A WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM ENCYCLOPEDIA
Samuel J. Rogal
GREENWOOD PRESS
A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia
A ...
549 downloads
2658 Views
2MB Size
Report
This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form
A WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM ENCYCLOPEDIA
Samuel J. Rogal
GREENWOOD PRESS
A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia
A WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM ENCYCLOPEDIA Samuel J. Rogal
GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rogal, Samuel J. A William Somerset Maugham encyclopedia / Samuel J. Rogal. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–313–29916–1 (alk. paper) 1. Maugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset), 1874–1965. 2. Authors, English—20th century—Biography. I. Title. PR6025.A86Z857 1997 823'.912—dc20 [B] 96–35025 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 1997 by Samuel J. Rogal All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96–35025 ISBN: 0–313–29916–1 First published in 1997 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America TM
The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents Preface
vii
Chronology
xi
The Encyclopedia
1
General Bibliography
323
Index
335
Preface I The literary record of William Somerset Maugham as writer requires no one to rise to its defense. Maugham may not be deserving of a position within the highest ranks of English literature, but few can effectively question the success or popularity of his fiction and drama when set in comparison with his contemporaries from the English literary transitional period (1880–1920). From October 1897, when he completed his medical education at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, until his death in December 1965, Maugham wrote twenty novels, filled nine volumes with his short stories, wrote thirty-one plays, published seven volumes of prose nonficton, and provided the substance for no less than seven motion pictures. On a more materialistic note, thirty-five of his paintings sold for $1,466,864 at Sotheby’s in April 1962; bequests in his will totaled $280,000; his royalties during the last ten years of his life averaged $50,000 per year; and his Riviera estate, purchased in 1927 for $48,000, brought $730,000 in 1967. Carrying the point further, there arises even less necessity for justifying the time and energy needed to produce a reference volume devoted to Maugham and his works. Simply, to read Maugham and to read about Maugham translate into learning about the world from the thirty-seventh year of Victoria’s reign to the thirteenth year in the reign of Elizabeth II. To view the world of Somerset Maugham and his work is to view the tensions of the Boer War, World War I, and World War II; to observe the London stage during the first thirty years of the twentieth century; to appreciate the rise of the literary agent; to understand the complexity, duality, and fear of the homosexual in a society where homosexuality could lead to imprisonment; to realize the friendships and jealousies among the literati; to bask in the lavish lifestyles of the upper echelons of British
viii
PREFACE
and American society during the first six decades of the twentieth century; to see the glamour of Hollywood, Paris, New York, San Francisco, and London; and to grasp the subtleties weaving through the inner weaknesses of a supposedly strong British colonial system in such romantic places as China, Malaya, Borneo, and India. Maugham lived through all of that, observed it all, played a part in it all, and wrote about all of that—and more. If we believe, as Dr. Johnson once told us, that literature mirrors life, then certainly Maugham must be given credit for providing his readers with a large glass through which to view his idea of what one may call life. Certainly, much of what Maugham wrote may be yellowed by time and jaundiced with his cynicism, but that does not mean we should ignore him. Through his novels, short fiction, and plays he remains today as a worthy representative of a successful and popular writer who, more often than not, knew his craft and understood the demands of his audiences. Thus, hopefully, this encyclopedia will lead the reader from each of its various entries directly to Maugham’s texts and to thoughts about what popular fiction, drama, and nonfiction narrative were, are, and ought to be. Then, of course, there exists the image of Maugham the man, with all of his psychological and emotional hang-ups. To know about William Somerset Maugham is to meet a sensitive, stuttering homosexual who, more than anything, wanted recognition and acceptance. In the end he achieved a certain degree of both, but never at the high levels to which he aspired. All of the money that he earned from royalties could never compensate for his inability to receive a title from the Crown or a prize from the Pulitzers or the Nobels. Of course, Maugham proved his own worst enemy. He worked long and hard to master his craft; yet, he actively sought and openly recruited the companionship of sleazy persons who did little to advance his talents or his reputation. If anything, the likes of Gerald Haxton, Alan Searle, or Karl Pfeiffer served only to reduce his public image and to deny him the recognition that he sought and, in certain instances, deserved. In the end, Maugham, despite his talent as writer, proved his own worst enemy in terms of achieving the personal satisfaction and the happiness that he wanted and especially needed. II This encyclopedia attempts to synthesize for, and convey to, the reader the always wide and often complex world of William Somerset Maugham—his drama, fiction, and prose nonfiction; his family; the people whom he knew and with whom he associated (professionally and personally); the places where he lived and to which he journeyed, particularly the cities and villages that he inserted into his work as background and setting; and the historical, cultural, social, and political issues that governed his long life and work. Each entry— work, person, place, event, institution, idea—initially provides the reader with a general background, then proceeds to identify and outline its specific relationship with Maugham.
PREFACE
ix
The encyclopedia begins with a Chronology of events important to Maugham’s life and work, its length necessitated, of course, by the nine decades in which the writer lived. The entries themselves are alphabetically arranged, each containing its own brief bibliography for additional consultation and reading. The General Bibliography lists, principally, sources cited in the encyclopedia entries, as well as works consulted and important to furthering one’s understanding of Maugham and his work. Finally, the encyclopedia contains an Index of persons, places, events, institutions, et al. that wend their ways throughout the entire work. The reader needs to keep in mind that the bibliography for each entry appears in a short form—using the last name of the author or editor and date for authors of multiple works. These citations are keyed to the full entry in the General Bibliography. Thus, in the entry on Sir Max Beerbohm, the bibliographical reference to ‘‘Behrman’’ directs the reader to the General Bibliography and Behrman, Samuel Nathaniel. Portrait of Max. An Intimate Memoir of Sir Max Beerbohm. New York: Random House, 1960.’’ Maugham’s works pertinent to the entry are listed at the beginning of the bibliography section. Cross-references to entries in this volume are noted with an asterisk. The reader should, however, take note of the headnote on the very first page of the Encyclopedia. Specific characters in short stories, novels, and plays have been presented and identified in their appropriate title entries within this volume; however, they are discussed in greater detail in a separate volume, Samuel J. Rogal, A Companion to the Characters in the Fiction and Drama of W. Somerset Maugham (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996). These cross-references are noted with a dagger (†). As usual, I wish to thank my wife, Susan, and my sons, Geoffrey and James, for their patience and tolerance, as well as to express my appreciation to the staff of Jacobs Library, Illinois Valley Community College—particularly Carol Bird, Jan Vogelgesang, and Evelyn Moyle—for their kindness, endurance, and assistance.
Chronology
1788 Birth of Robert Ormond Maugham the elder, William Somerset Maugham’s (WSM) paternal grandfather. 1791 On 6 May, Charles Snell, WSM’s paternal grandfather born. 1817 Birth of Anne Alicia Todd, WSM’s maternal grandmother. 1823 Robert Ormond Maugham, WSM’s father, born. 1837 On 7 January, Charles Snell, WSM’s maternal grandfather, marries Anne Alicia Todd. 1840 On 10 May, Edith Mary Snell, WSM’s mother, born. 1841 On 3 June, Major Charles Snell (b.1791), WSM’s maternal grandfather, dies in India; on 29 July, his third daughter (the first died immediately after birth), WSM’s aunt, Rose Ellen Cleveland Snell, born. 1845 Birth of Ellen Mary Matthew Maugham, second wife of the Reverend Henry MacDonald Maugham and the aunt of WSM. 1848 Robert Ormond Maugham and William Dixon open a law office at No. 12, Rue Royale, Paris, and principally represent the British Embassy. 1853 On 21 August, Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome, first husband of Gwendolyn Syrie Barnardo Wellcome Maugham, born. 1862 On 16 July, Robert Ormond Maugham the elder (b.1788), WSM’s paternal grandfather, dies. 1863 Robert Ormond Maugham and William Dixon move their law office to No. 54, Faubourg Saint Honore, Paris, almost directly across the street from the British Embassy; on 1 October, Robert Ormond Maugham marries Edith Mary Snell; they take up residence in an elegant third-floor apartment at No. 25, Avenue d’Antin.
xii
CHRONOLOGY
1864 Birth of Robert Cleveland Maugham, WSM’s brother, who died in infancy. 1865 On 14 November, Charles Ormond Maugham, WSM’s brother, born in Paris. 1866 On 20 October, at Paris, Frederic Herbert Maugham, WSM’s brother, born. 1868 On 12 June, Henry Neville Maugham, WSM’s brother, born in Paris. 1896 On 12 March Rose Ellen Cleveland Snell (b.1841), WSM’s aunt, dies. 1873 In June, Dr. Thomas John Barnardo marries Sarah Louise (Syrie) Elmslie. 1874 On 25 January, William Somerset Maugham born at the British Embassy, Paris. 1877 In September WSM’s three older brothers, Charles Ormond, Frederic Herbert, and Henry Neville Maugham, sent to Dover College in Kent. 1879 Birth of Gwendolyn Maude Syrie Barnardo. 1882 On 24 January, Edith Mary Snell Maugham, WSM’s mother, gives birth to her sixth son, Edward Alan Maugham; on 25 January, Edward Alan Maugham dies; on 31 January, Edith Mary Snell Maugham (b.1840) dies. 1884 On 24 June Robert Ormond Maugham (b.1823), WSM’s father, dies; WSM, in the company of his French nurse, travels to Whitstable, Kent, to live with his father’s brother, the Reverend Henry MacDonald Maugham and his first wife, Barbara Sophia von Scheidlin Maugham. 1885 The passage in Parliament of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (or Sexual Offense Act), which for the first time prohibits indecent relations between consenting male adults; in May, WSM enrolled in the junior school of King’s School, Canterbury, Kent. 1886 Passage of the Copyright Act: English authors now allowed to earn royalties on editions of their works published in the United States. 1888 In winter, WSM suffers from pleurisy and spends several months at Hyeres, on the French Riviera; he returns to King’s School in the spring of 1889; WSM spends the following winter at Hyeres and returns to Whitstable vicarage in spring of 1890. 1889 In July, WSM officially and permanently withdraws from King’s School. 1890 In late summer or early fall, WSM goes to Heidelberg, Germany, presumably to study German, and meets John Ellingham Brooks. 1892 Death of Barbara Sophia von Scheidlin Maugham, WSM’s aunt and the first wife of the Reverend Henry MacDonald Maugham; in spring, WSM returns to Whitstable from Heidelberg; spends a month as an articled clerk to a London accountant; on 27 September, WSM registers as a medical student at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London; on 6 October, Gerald Haxton born in San Francisco. 1894 Rev. Henry MacDonald Maugham, WSM’s uncle, marries Ellen Mary Matthew; in spring, WSM leaves London during Easter holiday to spend six weeks in Italy. 1895 Oscar Wilde tried and convicted of sodomy and gross indecency under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act (or the Sexual Offenses Act) and sentenced to prison; he spends the largest part of his sentence in Reading Gaol; WSM makes his initial journey to Capri. 1896 Frederic Herbert Maugham marries Helen Mary Romer; WSM finishes his first
CHRONOLOGY
xiii
two stories, ‘‘A Bad Example’’ and ‘‘Daisy,’’ and sends them to T. Fisher Unwin, who rejects them; WSM spends three weeks in the obstetrics ward at St. Thomas’ Hospital. 1897 On 19 May, Oscar Wilde is released from Reading Gaol; on 18 September, Henry MacDonald Maugham, WSM’s uncle, dies; the publication of Liza of Lambeth (novel); in October, WSM passes his examinations at St. Thomas’ Hospital and earns his diplomas as a licensed surgeon and physician but refuses an appointment to the obstetrics ward at St. Thomas’; WSM employs William Morris Colles as his first literary agent; in December, WSM leaves England for Spain, where he remains until April 1899. 1898 Publication of The Making of a Saint (novel), WSM’s first book to be published in the United States; in October, WSM’s first published story, ‘‘The Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian,’’ appears in Cosmopolis, a trilingual magazine. 1899 Publication of Orientations (short stories). 1901 On 19 January, Queen Victoria dies; on 25 June, Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome marries Gwendolyn Maude Syrie Barnardo; birth of Honor Betty Earl Maugham, daughter of Frederic Herbert and Helen Mary Romer Maugham and niece of WSM; publication of The Hero (novel), the first book to feature the famous Moorish symbol. 1902 Publication of Mrs. Craddock (novel), WSM’s first book for William Heinemann; on 3 January, WSM’s play Schiffbruchig [Shipwrecked] (never published by that title) staged at Berlin. 1903 Publication of ‘‘Marriages Are Made in Heaven,’’ the English version of Schiffbruchig (play) in Venture, and A Man of Honour (play); WSM and Laurence Housman coedit Venture, which lasts for only two issues; WSM’s brief affair with Violet Hunt. 1904 Death of Anne Alicia Todd Snell (b.1817), WSM’s maternal grandmother; publication of The Merry-Go-Round (novel); on 18 February, the staging of Mademoiselle Zampa (never published); on 27 July, Henry Neville Maugham, WSM’s brother, takes his life by swallowing a bottle of nitric acid; WSM leaves England for France, where he meets the painter Gerald Kelly; WSM returns to London. 1905 In February, WSM and Harry Philips occupy a flat in Paris; WSM meets Arnold Bennett, the artists James Wilson Morrice and Roderick O’Conor, and the satanist Aleister Crowley; at Capri in July and August, WSM dismisses William Morris Colles and engages James Brand Pinker as his literary agent; publication of The Land of the Blessed Virgin (descriptive sketches and narrative impressions). 1906 During January and March, WSM in Greece and Egypt; in April, WSM meets the attractive and promiscuous actress Ethelwyn Sylvia Jones and thus begins an affair that lasts for seven years; publication of The Bishop’s Apron (novel). 1907 Publication of The Explorer (novel). 1908 On 16 September, Diana Maugham Marr-Johnson, daughter of Frederic Herbert and Helen Mary Romer Maugham and WSM’s niece, born; publication of The Magician (novel). 1909 On 29 April WSM is elected to the Garrick Club.
xiv
CHRONOLOGY
1910 In May, Kind Edward VII dies; WSM meets Hugh Walpole; that fall, WSM visits the United States for the first time; in September, Henry Solomon Wellcome and Gwendolyn Maude Syrie Barnardo Wellcome sign a deed of separation. 1911 WSM meets Gwendolyn Maude Syrie Barnardo Wellcome. 1912 Publications of Lady Frederick (play), Jack Straw (play), Mrs. Dot (play), The Explorer (play), and Penelope (play). 1913 Ethelwyn Sylvia Jones rejects WSM’s proposal of marriage; publications of Smith (play), The Tenth Man (play), The Land of Promise (play), and Landed Gentry (play; performed in 1910 as Grace). 1914 In October, WSM joins the Red Cross, is attached to the French army, first as an interpreter then as an ambulance driver, and meets Gerald Haxton. 1915 In February, WSM returns to England because of Syrie Wellcome’s pregnancy; in July, WSM takes Syrie to Rome for the delivery of their baby; publication in August of Of Human Bondage (novel); on 1 September, Elizabeth (Liza) Mary Maugham born to WSM and Gwendolyn Maude Syrie Barnardo Wellcome; in late September, WSM leaves the Red Cross and joins British Intelligence as an espionage agent in Switzerland (until summer 1916); on 13 November, Gerald Haxton and John Lindsell are arrested at a London hotel, then charged with gross indecency under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, tried, and found not guilty. 1916 Robert (Robin) Cecil Romer Maugham, WSM’s favorite nephew, born, son of Frederic Herbert and Helen Mary Romer Maugham; on 14 February, Henry Solomon Wellcome files for divorce against Gwendolyn Maude Syrie Barnardo Wellcome on the grounds of adultery, with WSM being named as correspondent; in November, WSM engages Gerald Haxton as his secretary/companion, and the two set out from New York for Hawaii, American Samoa, and Tahiti; on board the ship, WSM meets the San Francisco stockbroker Bertram Alanson, the man who will handle his investments from 1922 to 1958 and make him a millionaire. 1917 On 26 May, in Jersey City, New Jersey, WSM marries Gwendolyn Maude Syrie Barnardo Wellcome; in June, WSM recruited by British Intelligence for espionage in Russia; on 28 July, he leaves England for Petrograd, where he remains until 18 October; in November, WSM admitted to a tuberculosis sanatorium at Banchory, Scotland. 1918 In spring, WSM released from Banchory and told to return in the fall; presentation of Love in a Cottage (play; never published). 1919 In February, Gerald Haxton is deported permanently from England as an undesirable alien; in spring, WSM is discharged from the sanatorium at Banchory, Scotland, with a clean bill of health; publication of The Moon and Sixpence (novel); in September, WSM leaves England for China by way of New York and Chicago; WSM remains in China until March 1920. 1920 In October, WSM goes to New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, in company with Gerald Haxton; publication of The Unknown (play). 1921 In February, WSM and Haxton off to Hawaii, Australia, and the Federated Malay States; publication of The Trembling of a Leaf (short stories) and The Circle (play).
CHRONOLOGY
xv
1922 In February, WSM meets Sinclair Lewis; in October, WSM and Gerald Haxton depart on a nine-month tour of Burma, Siam, and Indochina; publication of On a Chinese Screen (a collection of travel narratives), The Unattainable (play, presented in 1916 under the title of Caroline), Caesar’s Wife (play), and East of Suez (play). 1923 Syrie Maugham enters the interior decorating business in London; publications of Our Betters (play) and Home and Beauty (play, presented in 1919 under the title Too Many Husbands); presentation of The Camel’s Back (play; unpublished); stage version of the short story ‘‘Rain’’ sold to Hollywood for $150,000 (WSM receives 25 percent); Charles Hanson Towne becomes WSM’s literary agent. 1924 WSM meets Carl Van Vechten in New York and D. H. Lawrence in Mexico City; publication of Loaves and Fishes (play); completion of The Road Uphill (play; never published, never produced). 1925 WSM in Guatemala in January; Honor Betty Earl Maugham (b.1910) marries Sebastian Earl (d.1983); Syrie Wellcome Maugham purchases property at Le Touquet, Normandy, and builds a house there, ‘‘Maison Eliza’’; in October, WSM travels to the Federated Malayan States; publication of The Painted Veil (novel). 1926 Doubleday and Company buys the firm of George H. Doran; in May, during the general strike, WSM working at Scotland Yard; in October, WSM purchases the Villa Mauresque, Cap Ferrat, on the French Riviera, for $48,000; publication of The Casuarina Tree (short stories). 1927 WSM fires Charles Towne as his literary agent; publication of The Constant Wife (play) and The Letter (play). 1928 Syrie Wellcome Maugham files a divorce petition in a French court; WSM meets Alan Searle and Godfrey Winn in London; publication of The Sacred Flame (play) and Ashenden, or the British Agent (short stories). 1929 In May, Syrie Wellcome Maugham granted a divorce from WSM; death of John Ellingham Brooks; Syrie Wellcome Maugham loses nearly all of her money in the New York Stock Exchange crash; WSM visits Greece and Egypt and meets Fred Bason aboard ship. 1930 Hugh Walpole discovers himself as ‘‘Alroy Kear’’ while reading the proofs of Cakes and Ale; publication of Cakes and Ale (novel), The Gentleman in the Parlour (travel narrative), and The Bread-Winner (play). 1931 Evelyn May Clowes Wiehe (‘‘Elinor Mordaunt’’) publishes (under the name of ‘‘A. Riposte’’) Gin and Bitters, a parody of Cakes and Ale; WSM meets Alec and Evelyn Waugh at Villa Mauresque and T. S. Eliot in London; publication of Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (short stories). 1932 Gerald Haxton and WSM travel to Berlin; WSM meets E. M. Forster at West Hackhurst; in December, WSM in Paris to attend the murder trial of Guy Albert Davin; publication of The Narrow Corner (novel) and For Services Rendered (play). 1933 WSM travels to Spain; publication of Ah King (short stories) and Sheppey (play); presentation of The Mask and the Face (play; unpublished).
xvi
CHRONOLOGY
1934 WSM refuses an invitation to join the executive committee of the PEN Club but is nonetheless elected. 1935 In May, at London, WSM meets Henry (Chips) Channon; WSM and Gerald Haxton travel to French Guiana and to the penal colony of St. Laurent du Maroni, by way of Haiti; publication of Don Fernando (travel and criticism). 1936 On 24 July, Liza Maugham marries Vincent Paravicini in London; on 25 July, Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome (b.1853) dies; WSM refuses an invitation to be a delegate to the PEN Club international convention at Buenos Aires; publication of Cosmopolitans (short stories) and My South Sea Island (a limited edition, published in Chicago, of fifty copies of an article in the London Daily Mail, 31 January 1922); Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon, rejects WSM’s article on detective stories; WSM visits King’s School, Canterbury. 1937 WSM meets Ruth Gordon; in May and June, WSM visits Paris and the Scandinavian countries, and in July he visits Germany; in October, WSM’s daughter, Liza Maugham Paravicini, gives birth to a boy, WSM’s first grandchild, Nicholas Somerset; in July, WSM places the Villa Mauresque for sale for £25,000; publication of Theatre (novel). 1938 WSM visits India; in March, Frederic Herbert Maugham becomes lord chancellor of England and serves until September 1939; WSM cancels his plans to sell the Villa Mauresque; WSM invites the duke and duchess of Windsor to the Mauresque for dinner; in September, WSM makes the first of his visits to the Swiss clinic of Dr. Paul Niehans for his cellular therapy treatments; Robin Maugham joins a British army tank regiment; in England, WSM meets S. N. Behrman; publication of The Summing Up (autobiographical essay). 1939 WSM visits the United States; Frederic Herbert Maugham becomes Lord Maugham, viscount of Hartfield; WSM commissioned by the British Ministry of Information to go to France and then to write a book on the French war effort; publication of Christmas Holiday (novel). 1940 After the fall of France in June, WSM leaves the Riviera for England; in October, WSM leaves England for the United States, where he will spend the remainder of the war years; in November, Gerald Haxton arrives in the United States after closing the Villa Mauresque and joins WSM in Chicago; publication of Books and You (essays), France at War (essay), and The Mixture As Before (short stories). 1941 WSM meets Dorothy Parker in Los Angeles; Liza Maugham Paravicini gives birth, at New York, to her second child, Camilla; WSM spends spring and summer in Hollywood; WSM engages Jacques Chambrun as his literary agent; in December, WSM moves into a house on the South Carolina estate of Nelson Doubleday; publication of Strictly Personal (autobiography) and Up at the Villa (novel). 1942 WSM in New York to consult with Dr. Max Wolf, another practitioner of cellular therapy; Gerald Haxton employed by the OSS as a clerk in Washington, D.C.; Robin Maugham seriously wounded in North Africa; WSM spends the summer on Martha’s Vineyard; in November, WSM delivers the Francis Bergen Memorial Lecture at Yale University; United Artists films The Moon and Sixpence; publication of The Hour before the Dawn (novel).
CHRONOLOGY
xvii
1943 Nelson Doubleday hires Gerald Haxton to manage the publishing firm’s commissary at Garden City, New York; in October, Haxton leaves Doubleday to return to his former clerical job in Washington with the OSS. 1944 In May, Gerald Haxton admitted to Doctor’s Hospital, New York, with tuberculosis and Addison’s disease; in August, the U.S. Seventh Army occupies the Villa Mauresque; Gerald Haxton dies on 7 November; publication of The Razor’s Edge (novel), with sales at a half-million copies in the first month. 1945 WSM engages Alan Searle as his secretary-companion, and he arrives in the United States on 25 December. 1946 In April, WSM donates the manuscript notebooks of Of Human Bondage to the Library of Congress; in June WSM and Alan Searle arrive at Cap Ferrat and begin repairs to the Villa Mauresque; publication of Then and Now (novel). 1947 WSM establishes the Maugham Prize to aid young writers; Liza and Vincent Paravicini obtain a divorce; WSM establishes the Somerset Maugham Prize for young authors; WSM engages A. P. Watt as his London literary agent; publication of Creatures of Circumstance (short stories). 1948 WSM dismisses Jacques Chambrun as his literary agent; in April, WSM visits Spain; death of Ethelwyn Sylvia Jones; in July, at London, Liza Maugham Paravicini marries John Hope; publication of Catalina (novel) and Great Novelists and Their Novels (essays); opening of the film Quartet. 1949 Nelson Doubleday dies in January; Graham Sutherland paints WSM’s portrait; publication of A Writer’s Notebook (extracts of notes). 1950 Death of Helen Mary Romer Maugham, wife of Frederic Herbert Maugham; Liza Maugham Hope gives birth to a boy, Julian John Somerset Hope; Professor Klaus W. Jonas founds the Center for Maugham Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; release of the film Trio; WSM presents the manuscript of ‘‘The Artistic Temperament of Philip Carey’’ to the Library of Congress on the condition that it never be published; in November, WSM lectures on Kant at Columbia University. 1951 In March, WSM speaks at the annual dinner of the Royal Academy; publication of The Writer’s Point of View (lecture). 1952 Konrad Bercovici sues WSM for plagiarism; in April, Liza Maugham Hope gives birth to a son, Jonathan Charles Hope; WSM meets Ian Fleming at the Mauresque; WSM receives an honorary doctor of letters degree from Oxford; in September, WSM operated on in Switzerland for a hernia; WSM visits King’s School, Canterbury; publication of The Vagrant Mood (essays). 1953 WSM and Alan Searle visit Greece and Turkey; publication of The Noble Spaniard (play). 1954 WSM celebrates his eightieth birthday at a banquet at the Garrick Club, London; William Heinemann commissions a Maugham Festschrift, but the project canceled for lack of contributors; in June, WSM travels to Buckingham Palace to receive the Companion of Honour from Queen Elizabeth II. 1955 Gwendolyn Maude Syrie Barnardo Maugham dies on 26 July; Center for
xviii
CHRONOLOGY
Maugham Studies moved from Rutgers University to Yale University; publication of ‘‘The Perfect Gentleman’’ (play performed in 1913) in Theatre Arts. 1956 In January, WSM and Alan Searle tour Egypt; in April, WSM attends the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Ranier of Monaco. 1957 In November, the Center for Maugham Studies is moved from Yale University to the University of Pittsburgh. 1958 On 23 March, Frederic Herbert Maugham (b.1866) dies; publication of Points of View (essays). 1959 In April, WSM visits London, Munich, Badgastein, Vienna, and Venice, then goes to Japan in October. 1961 In May, WSM receives a Companion of Literature from the Royal Society of Literature, and later that month he becomes an honorary senator at Heidelberg, Germany; death of WSM’s favorite niece, Kate Mary Maugham Bruce. 1962 In April, thirty-five of WSM’s paintings from the Villa Mauresque sold at auction at Sotheby’s, London, for $1,466,864; Liza Maugham Hope sues Sotheby’s, claiming $648,900 of that amount; publication of Purely for My Pleasure (narrative describing WSM’s art collection); the autobiographical ‘‘Looking Back’’ serialized in the Sunday Express (September–October); in December, WSM adopts Alan Searle, while WSM sues Liza Maugham Hope for the return of all gifts sent to her. 1963 Liza Maugham Hope challenges, in the French courts, WSM’s adoption of Alan Searle; Camilla Paravicini marries Bluey Malvoleon, but WSM does not attend the wedding; in July, a French court voids WSM’s adoption of Alan Searle. 1964 Liza Maugham Hope’s suit for her share of the 1962 auction receipts settled out of court, and she receives $250,000; in July, WSM drafts his will: Liza Hope receives the Mauresque, Alan Searle receives £50,000, WSM’s royalties, and the contents of the Mauresque. 1965 Winston Churchill dies; the Center for Maugham Studies closed, and the collection moved to the Harry Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas at Austin; in March, WSM treated for pneumonia; in December, WSM admitted to the Anglo-American Hospital in Nice, where he dies on 15 December; WSM’s body later cremated at Marseilles, and the ashes buried at the foot of the Maugham Library, King’s College, Canterbury, on 22 December. 1966 Publication of Beverley Nichols’ A Case of Human Bondage, in which the author condemns WSM for attacking Syrie Barnardo Wellcome Maugham in the latter’s ‘‘Looking Back’’ (1962). 1967 In November, Alan Searle sells the contents of the Villa Mauresque for approximately $75,000; repeal of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, meaning homosexuality no longer a crime to be punished by imprisonment. 1969 An American real estate developer buys the Villa Mauresque for $730,000. 1981 On 15 March, Robert (Robin) Cecil Romer Maugham (b.1916), WSM’s favorite nephew, dies.
A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia
A Characters from the fiction and drama are marked by a dagger (†) and are described in detail in Samuel J. Rogal, A Companion to the Characters in the Fiction and Drama of W. Somerset Maugham (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).
AGUILA, JEANNE. See EAGLES, JEANNE. AH KING (1933). A volume of six short stories, set in the *Federated Malay States and published in September. These include *‘‘Back of Beyond,’’ *‘‘The Book-Bag,’’ *‘‘The Door of Opportunity,’’ *‘‘Footprints in the Jungle,’’ *‘‘Neil MacAdam,’’ and *‘‘The Vessel of Wrath.’’ Maugham continues his cold and ruthless expose´ of transplanted English civil servants and plantation owners and managers, particularly their adulterous relationships with one another and with natives, repeating and recasting rumors and gossip actually related to him by real persons. In all of the stories, one realizes a central theme of persons’ unpredictable behavior under emotional and occupational stress that creates, faraway from an orderly England, a world of almost total disorder. Bibliography: Ah King; Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Menard (1965); Morgan; Mortimer; Pollock.
ALANSON, BERTRAM (1877–1958). A Jewish stockbroker from San Francisco and *Maugham’s oldest American friend. The family, originally named Abrahamson, came from *Germany; the father owned coffee plantations in Guatemala, where Bertram attended university. Maugham first met him in November 1916, on board a ship from San Francisco to *Honolulu. Tall and always elegantly dressed, his cultural tastes extended to opera and literature. With his
2
‘‘THE ALIEN CORN’’
brother, Lionel, he founded the brokerage firm of Alanson Brothers and rose to become head of the San Francisco Stock Exchange. He married in 1923 and at the age of forty-six, a beautiful model, Mabel Bremer. Alanson managed Maugham’s money from 1922 until his death (from throat cancer) and made the writer a millionaire. Maugham wrote in excess of six hundred letters to him. He owned every one of Maugham’s books in its first edition; the Bertram Alanson Maugham Collection now resides at Stanford University. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Curtis (1974); Morgan.
‘‘THE ALIEN CORN’’ (1931). Appeared in *Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular. A Jewish family desperately strives to throw off its traditional racial ties and characteristics and to become Gentile as well as English. Thus, †Hannah Rabenstein, sister of †Ferdy Rabenstein, has become the dowager Lady Bland by marriage to Sir Alfred Bland (formerly Alphonse Bleikogel); their son Freddy (Sir Adolphus Bland) and his wife, Miriam, have, in turned, produced George and Harry Bland. George, the elder son, after dismissal from Oxford, spends two years in Munich trying to master the piano—for which he has little or no talent. In the end, after having deteriorated physically as well as spiritually, he kills himself. In 1948, Robert Cedric Sherriff (1896–1975), the British dramatist and novelist, combined *‘‘The Facts of Life,’’ ‘‘The Alien Corn,’’ *‘‘The Kite,’’ and *‘‘The Colonel’s Lady’’ into a screenplay entitled *Quartet, produced by J. Arthur Rank in 1949. Bibliography: First Person Singular; Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Cordell; Kruschwitz (1939–1940a); Morgan.
‘‘THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER’’ (1924). A short story published originally in Cosmopolitan magazine and then (1936) in a collection of Maugham’s stories from that periodical entitled *Cosmopolitans. The †Narrator begins with the thesis from a La Fontaine fable, where ‘‘in an imperfect world industry is rewarded and giddiness punished.’’ Likable †Tom Ramsay suddenly leaves his wife and children, borrows and blackmails money from relatives and friends, and philanders all over Europe. His brother †George, to the contrary, practices honesty and industry, in the belief that only work and respectability will reap the harvest. In the end, Tom becomes engaged to a woman old enough to be his mother; she dies and leaves him nearly half a million pounds, a yacht, a house in London, and another in the country. Bibliography: Cosmopolitans; Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Sopher.
‘‘APPEARANCE AND REALITY’’ (1934). A short story found in *Creatures of Circumstance (1947). The title may well have been borrowed from Appearance and Reality (1893), an idealist philosophical tract of contemporary metaphysical thought by the Oxford don Frances Herbert Bradley (1846–1924). *Maugham examines, with amusement, the sexual code of †Raymond Le Sueur,
ASHENDEN: OR THE BRITISH AGENT
3
a Parisian senator in his fifties, who falls in love with, and maintains, the young and engaging †Lisette Larion. He forces her to marry her other lover—a commercial traveler who comes to Paris only on weekends—so that he can claim a respectable woman for a mistress. Bibliography: Creatures of Circumstance; Complete Stories. II. The World Over.
ARLEN, MICHAEL (1895–1956). A Jewish Armenian, originally named Dikran Kouyumdjian. Born in Ruschuk, Bulgaria, he studied in England (Malvern College and Edinburgh) and became a naturalized citizen in 1922. A secondrate fiction writer, he became one of *Maugham’s close friends among the English literati, as well as his golf and tennis partner. He and his wife, Atalanta, resided frequently at Cannes (living near Maugham) on the Riviera. He died in New York. Arlen’s novels of fashionable London life, Piracy (1922) and The Green Hat (1924), proved extremely popular—the latter, particularly, in view of its heroine’s being a nymphomaniac. Bibliography: Crystal; Drabble; Morgan.
ASHENDEN: OR THE BRITISH AGENT (1928). A collection of six short stories combined with brief wartime anecdotes based firmly on *Maugham’s experiences (1916–1917) in *Switzerland and then in Russia, where he served as an espionage agent for British Secret Intelligence Service, supporting the Russian provisional government against the Bolsheviks. Set in Switzerland, *France, Russia, and *Italy, the original stories include ‘‘The Greek,’’ *‘‘Giulia Lazzari,’’ ‘‘Gustav,’’ *‘‘The Hairless Mexican,’’ *‘‘His Excellency,’’ ‘‘Love and Russian Literature,’’ *‘‘Miss King,’’ *‘‘Mr. Harrington’s Washing,’’ *‘‘The Traitor,’’ and ‘‘A Trip to Paris.’’ The central character and narrator, †Ashenden (who appears also in *Cakes and Ale and *The Moon and Sixpence), takes his name from Leonard Ashenden, a classmate of Maugham at King’s School, Canterbury. The American edition was Maugham’s first publication for Doubleday, Doran, and Company; in 1947, his New York agent, *Jacques Chambrun, sold the film rights for $75,000. In total, the stories constitute a significant contribution to the genre of spy fiction. Bibliography: Ashenden; Collected Short Stories. I. East and West; Calder, (1972/ 1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Jonas (1959); Morgan; Pollock.
B BACK, BARBARA NASH (fl. 1925–1960). *Maugham’s closest woman friend and the wife of Dr. Ivor Back. Blond, beautiful, and elegant, she became known for her parties and her willingness to include *homosexuals among her guests. She often entertained for Maugham at parties for the openings of his plays, as well as kept him abreast of the London gossip when he went abroad. She possibly served as the model for †Margery Hobson Bishop in the short story *‘‘Virtue.’’ Left penniless by the death of her husband, she wrote a beauty column for the Daily Mirror, taught manners to debutantes, and wrote a volume of short stories about social life in Mayfair, London. Bibliography: Calder, (1989/1990); Morgan.
BACK, DR. IVOR (d.1951). The handsome husband of Barbara Nash Back and a surgeon at St. George’s Hospital, London. At Cambridge, he was a classmate of *Gerald Kelly and Aleister Crowley. He received his medical education at St. George’s. Bibliography: Calder, (1989/1990); Morgan; Who Was Who (1950–1960).
‘‘THE BACK OF BEYOND’’ (1931, 1933). A short story written in 1931 and published two years later in *Ah King. Set in the *Federated Malay States, the piece stands as a simple tale of adultery and as an example, in *Maugham’s view, of the frivolous conduct of the English when they transplant to the colonies. †Violet Saffary plans to run off with a planter (and her husband’s closest friend), †Harold (Knobby) Clarke. At the last moment, Knobby balks, particularly because he finds that Violet is pregnant. He kills himself on the boat on the way back to England. Bibliography: Ah King; Complete Short Stories. I. East and West.
BARNARDO, THOMAS JOHN
5
‘‘A BAD EXAMPLE’’ (1899). A short story, written in early 1896, during *Maugham’s fourth year as a medical student at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London; rejected initially (July 1896) by *T. Fisher Unwin, who later published it in Orientations (1899), Maugham’s first collection of stories. A London clerk, †James Clinton, serves on a coroner’s jury that hears the suicides of three members of the exploited underclass. Totally disillusioned by what he hears, Clinton decides to devote his life to helping the poor, even if it means sacrificing himself and his family. What follows proves that because a hypocritical society cannot understand or accommodate good deeds, it translates one’s attempts at sincere Christianity into insanity. Believing her husband to have gone mad, †Amy Clinton consults an incompetent psychiatrist and has James committed to an institution. Maugham reworked the story for his final play, *Sheppey (1933). Bibliography: Orientations; Seventeen Lost Stories; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Morgan.
BARNARDO, JOHN MICHAELIS (1800–?). Father of Dr. Thomas John Barnardo and the grandfather of *Syrie Barnardo Maugham. In the early 1840s, he emigrated from Hamburg, *Germany, to Dublin, Ireland, and he established himself as a fur merchant. He married twice and fathered seventeen children. *Maugham believed the family to be German Jews who fled Hamburg because of the anti-Semitic atmosphere that dominated the city; the family, in turn, traced its origins to Venice, followed by conversion to the Lutheran church in the sixteenth century. Bibliography: DNB.
BARNARDO, SARA LOUISE (SYRIE) ELMSLIE (1842–1944). The wife of Dr. Thomas John Barnardo and mother of *Syrie Barnardo Maugham. Her father served as an underwriter for Lloyd’s of London. She met her future husband early in 1873, after she had become involved in charity work and founded a home for poor boys in Richmond. She married Barnardo in June 1873 and bore him seven children, four of whom survived early childhood (one of them a mentally retarded dwarf). *Maugham did not meet her until 1915, when she came to London from Rome to be with her pregnant daughter, Syrie. Bibliography: Cordell; DNB; Morgan.
BARNARDO, THOMAS JOHN (1845–1905). Husband of Sara Louise Elmslie Barnardo and father of *Syrie Barnardo Maugham. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, a frail and almost totally deaf child. Initially a clerk, he underwent religious conversion in 1862 and then spent time preaching in the Dublin slums. In 1866, he journeyed to London Hospital to study medicine, hoping to become a missionary doctor to *China; however, he determined to remain in the city to help the homeless and neglected children of the poor. While still a medical student he established, in 1867, the East End Mission, a ragged school for destitute children, at Hope Place, Stepney. In 1870, he secured financial help
6
BARRYMORE, ETHEL
from a number of philanthropists, including Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh earl of Shaftesbury (1801–1885), and founded a series of orphanages known as Barnardo Homes for girls and boys—twenty-seven in London and sixteen throughout the rest of England, each with its touring troupe of Barnardo Musical Boys. He and his wife settled in Mossford Lodge, Essex, where, on sixty acres of land, he built sixty-five cottages for orphaned boys and girls. Today, there are more than 165 such homes throughout the United Kingdom. Bibliography: Crystal; DNB; Weinreb and Hibbert.
BARRYMORE, ETHEL (1879–1959). A leading American stage and film actress, she was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of Maurice Barrymore [Herbert Blyth] (1847–1905) and Georgiana Drew Barrymore (1856–1893). At the peak of her stage career, she was tall and lovely, with remarkable eyes. She performed the role of †Lady Frederick Berolles in *Charles Frohman’s production of *Lady Frederick for ninety-six performances in New York City during the 1907 season, as well as in the national tour that followed. She repeated the same role in the 1919 film version. Barrymore opened as †Constance Middleton in *The Constant Wife in Cleveland, Ohio, on 1 November 1926, before the production moved to Broadway. She also served (as did a number of other actresses) as a model for †Julian Lambert Gosselyn in *Maugham’s novel *Theatre. Bibliography: Freedley and Reeves; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
BASON, FRED (b.1904; fl. 1925–1966). A Cockney bookseller, born in the London slum of Walworth, the son of a harness maker. He attended a London City Council elementary school until the age of fourteen. His entrance into the literary world began when he collected and sold cigarette cards and then sold books from a wheelbarrow; eventually, he established the Greyhound Bookshop in Walworth. A small and especially unattractive bachelor, he was an avid reader, particularly of *Maugham’s works. He first wrote to Maugham in 1928, and the two finally met in May 1930. In 1931, he compiled the initial bibliography (complete with errors and omissions) of Maugham’s work. Bason functioned as Maugham’s resource for Cockney life and language, and thus the two became close friends. That friendship deteriorated in 1933 and came to an end in 1936, when Bason attempted, on several occasions, to exploit Maugham, particularly in the sale of his manuscripts and first editions. He was injured in the London blitz of 1940, from which he developed palsy and a serious stammer. Bibliography: Calder, (1989/1990); Morgan.
BATH CLUB. A London swimming and bridge club founded in 1894 by two members of the Carlton Club (and their friends) because no London club housed a swimming pool. They purchased the marquess of Abergavenny’s house at 34 Dover Street and converted the ballroom into a swimming bath. The building
BEERBOHM, SIR HENRY MAXIMILIAN
7
burned in 1941, and the members occupied various London houses until they found a more permanent home at 43 Brook Street. The club closed in June 1981. *Maugham joined it in 1899 or 1900, and it became the site of first-night parties for several of his plays (e.g., A Man of Honour, 1903). The writer played bridge there regularly. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan; Weinreb and Hibbert.
THE BEACHCOMBER (1938). A motion picture based on the short story *‘‘The Vessel of Wrath’’ (1931); produced by Paramount Studios and starring Charles Laughton (1899–1962) and Elsa Lanchester (1902–1986). ‘‘BEAUTY AND THE PROFESSOR’’ (1950). The title of a lecture delivered by *Maugham at Columbia University, New York City, on 2 November 1950, on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), particularly concerning art and taste and the rejection of materialism. Maugham sought, in Kant, a correlation between the pleasure one derives from art and the ennobling of one’s character. Artistic pleasure should contribute toward the acquisition of virtue. Essentially, the piece is heavily biographical; Maugham appears more interested in Kant the eighteenth-century man than in his philosophy. The essay and the reading of it had been suggested by Maugham’s friend Erwin Edman, then a professor of philosophy at Columbia. Bibliography: The Vagrant Mood: Six Essays (1952); Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
BEAVERBROOK, WILLIAM MAXWELL AITKEN, FIRST BARON (1879–1964). The British publisher, financier, and politician born at Maple, Ontario, Canada. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he entered business, later became a stockbroker (1907), and amassed a fortune from the amalgamation of Canadian cement mills. He then moved to England in 1910 and began his newspaper empire with the Daily Express (1916), the Sunday Express (1921), and the Evening Standard (1929). He served in Parliament first from 1911 through 1916, held cabinet positions in 1918 and during the 1940s, and served as a confidant of his friend *Winston Churchill. As *Maugham’s neighbor at Cap d’ Ail on the Riviera, the two became close friends, beginning in late 1960 or early 1961. Beaverbrook bought the serialization rights to Maugham’s autobiography, *Looking Back on Eighty Years, for £35,000, the extracts of which he published in eight installments in the Sunday Express (September 1962). Bibliography: Calder, (1972/1973); Crystal; DNB; Morgan.
BEERBOHM, SIR HENRY MAXIMILIAN (1872–1956). English critic, essayist, and caricaturist, known simply and to all as Max. The son of Julius Ewald Beerbohm, a German corn merchant, and his second wife (the sister of his first, Constance), Eliza Draper, he was educated at Charterhouse and at Merton College, Oxford. He became known for his wit, irony, and satire. As half brother
8
‘‘BEFORE THE PARTY’’
of the actor/manager Sir Herbert Draper Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917), he had access to theatrical circles and eventually (1910) married the American actress Florence Kahn (1877–1951). In 1898, Beerbohm succeeded *George Bernard Shaw as drama critic of the Saturday Review, a position he held until 1912. There he reviewed (not always positively, but always with sincerity) *Maugham’s plays (beginning with *A Man of Honour, 1903); he told him that he had no future as a playwright and argued against Maugham’s belief that persons went to the theater to be entertained, rather than for the ideas of a play. However, after attending a performance of The Explorer, he exclaimed that all of the London theaters should be ‘‘Maughamized.’’ The two became became early and lifelong friends. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Curtis (1977); DNB; Morgan.
‘‘BEFORE THE PARTY’’ (1926). The opening piece in *Maugham’s third collection of short stories, *The Casuarina Tree. Set in England, the story focuses upon †Millicent, the widow of †Harold, a minor judge in *Borneo, who had slashed her husband’s throat with a parang (a Malay sword) after recognizing his inability to control his alcoholism. Totally without remorse, she relates the details of the incident to her middle-class country family, the †Skinners, as they prepare to leave for a garden tea party at the home of the vicar, †Canon Heywood, in honor of the visiting †Bishop of *Hong Kong. Rodney Ackland (1909–), the noted English actor and playwright, adapted the story for the stage in 1949 (published by Samuel French in 1950). Bibliography: The Casuarina Tree; Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Cordell.
BEHRMAN, SAMUEL NATHANIEL (1893–1973). Jewish-American playwright, the son of a Worcester, Massachusetts, rabbi. He studied at Clark, Harvard, and Columbia universities. Squat, nearsighted, ugly, and a constant cigarette smoker, Behrman first met *Maugham in 1938 at the country house of the poet and prose writer Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), and they became close friends. He adapted Maugham’s short story *‘‘Jane’’ into a three-act play that opened in London in 1947, starring Basil Rathbone. In the adaptation, Behrman transformed Maugham’s original narrator into the central character, a welltraveled English writer by the name of Willie Tower (a prototype of Maugham). In February 1952, Jane opened on Broadway and ran for one hundred performances. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Hartnoll; Morgan.
BENNETT, [ENOCH] ARNOLD (1867–1931). English writer of fiction and theatre journalism. He was one of *Maugham’s early friends among the literati, as well as a prolific hack writer. Born in Staffordshire, the son of a potter who had become, by his own initiative, a solicitor, Bennett attended local schools and then entered London University. In appearance, he was small and ugly, with
BLACK, DOUGLAS
9
protruding upper teeth, a distinct nasal tone, and a pronounced stammer (far worse than Maugham’s), making speech extremely difficult. The painter *Gerald Kelly introduced Maugham to him at Paris in March 1905. Later, Bennett arranged for Maugham to become a client of the literary agent *James Brand Pinker. As did Maugham, Bennett became highly successful and affluent. He died from typhoid fever. Bibliography: ‘‘Some Novelists I Have Known’’; Calder (1972/1973), (1989/1990); Cordell; DNB; Morgan.
BENSON, EDWARD FREDERIC (1867–1940). Prolific English writer of popular fiction, one of four sons born to Edward White Benson (1829–1896), archbishop of Canterbury from 1883. He was the brother of the biographer and diarist Arthur Christopher Benson (1862–1925) and the novelist (turned Roman Catholic) Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914). His popularity came from two sets of novels, known, respectively, as ‘‘Dodo’’ and ‘‘Lucia’’—the latter reissued in 1977. Never known for his masculinity, he belonged to *Maugham’s circle of *homosexual friends. He, Maugham, and *John Ellingham Brooks often shared houses, both in England and on the Riviera. Bibliography: Benson (1930/1985); Calder (1989/1990); DNB; Morgan.
THE BISHOP’S APRON: A STUDY IN THE ORIGINS OF A GREAT FAMILY (1906). A novelized version of *Maugham’s finished but at that time unproduced play, Loaves and Fishes. Dedicated to *Harry Philips, the novel was published in February by Chapman and Hall, London, and reissued in 1908 as part of Newnes Sixpenny Novel Series. †Canon Theodore Spratte, a widower in his early fifties and a pompous and rather ignorant London cleric, plots to gain a bishopric. In the end, he succeeds, essentially because he aids his campaign by marrying †Gwendolyn Durant, the young daughter of an influential brewer. However, he first had to extricate himself from his engagement to †Mrs. Fitzherbert, a widow who will lose her income if she remarries. Adding to the farcical complexities of the piece, Theodore’s daughter, †Winnie Spratte, has become enamored of †Bertram Railing, a socialist reformer from the lower classes whose social liabilities include a Cockney mother and a militant sister; Theodore needs to sever that relationship and get Winnie attached to someone of her own class. His son and his curate, †Lionel Spratte, lacks ambition and balks at a proposed union with Gwendolyn, his future stepmother. Theodore’s brother, †Lord Thomas Spratte, counters the vicar’s pomposity and corrects his inaccuracies about their family history, while their unmarried elder sister, †Lady Sophia Spratte, serves as the handsome and dignified matriarch of the clan. Bibliography: Brander; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Viswanath.
BLACK, DOUGLAS (fl. 1945–1960). Black became president of Doubleday and Company, *Maugham’s American publisher, in 1947. He was also a close
10
BOER WAR
friend of *Bertram Alanson. In late 1948, when *Nelson Doubleday lay seriously ill, Black tried to have him declared incompetent and the business turned over to trustees. Maugham convinced him to hold off, in light of Doubleday’s fast-approaching death. Black eventually gained control of Doubleday shortly after January 1949. On 3 November 1950, the evening following Maugham’s lecture on Immanuel Kant at Columbia University, Black invited the writer to a bridge party at Columbia, one of the players being the then-president of the university, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Robin Maugham (1978); Morgan.
BOER WAR (1899–1902). Also known as the South African War and the Anglo-Boer War. The event proved the culmination of over a century of hostility between the Boers (descendants of the Dutch colonists who had made the first European settlements in southern Africa in the seventeenth century) and the British, who had seized control of the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch in 1795. The Boers eventually surrendered to Britain, but, according to the Treaty of Vereeniging (May 1902), retained personal liberty and property. Thus, Afrikaans would continue to be spoken, there would be no war tax, and Britain would pay £3 million for rehabilitation. The British lost 22,000 men (two-thirds through disease) of the 450,000 who participated and spent £200 hundred million. On the other side, 24,000 Boers died (20,000 of them in refugee camps). The effects of the war upon staid, provincial English life and upon *Maugham’s own pacifism may be best observed in his novel *The Hero (1901) and his play *The Unknown (1920, with Basil Rathbone playing the lead role); the event also rises to the surface in *A Man of Honour (1903). In 1900, one of Maugham’s London hostesses, the aged Christina Steevens, had lost her celebrated husband, the foreign correspondent for the London Daily Mail and writer of war narratives (the most noted being With Kitchener to Khartoum [1898]), George W. Steevens, at the siege of Ladysmith. As for Maugham himself, he viewed the Boer War as the beginning of the end of the British Empire. Bibliography: Belcham and Price.
‘‘THE BOOK-BAG’’ (1932). A short story, originally rejected by Ray Long, editor of Cosmopolitan, because of its treatment of incest. *Maugham then published it in the 1933 collection, *Ah King. The †Narrator, a person with a passion for books, visits Malaya and lodges at the home of the acting resident, †Mark Featherstone, to whom he lends a recent biography of Lord Byron, complete with the references to the incestuous relationship between the poet and his half sister, Augusta Leigh—the only clue to the actual thesis of the story. Featherstone, in turn, relates the story of †Olive Hardy, a woman whom he loved and who lived on a plantation with her brother, †Tim Hardy. Tim goes to England and returns with a young wife, †Sally Hardy, at which point Olive kills herself, thus destroying her brother’s marriage. Bibliography: Ah King; Stories. I. East and West; Brander; Cordell; Curtis (1974).
BOUCICAULT, DIONYSIUS GEORGE
11
BOOKS AND YOU (1940). A collection of three essays that appeared serially in The Saturday Evening Post during 1939 and then were published by Doubleday, Doran, and Company and reprinted by Arno in 1977. The volume comprises *Maugham’s reactions to what he terms only the best works of the first-rate writers of English and American literature, with his suggestions on how to read them and his critical comments. Most interesting is Maugham’s advice on the advantages of skimming over unimportant sections of works and reading six or seven books at once. Maugham apologizes for his cursory treatment of the works. Bibliography: Curtis (1974).
BORNEO. An island of the western Pacific Ocean in the Malay Archipelago, between the Sulu and Java Seas and southwest of the Philippines and the third largest island in the world. The sultanate of Brunei (a self-governing British protectorate until 1 January 1984) is on the northwest coast; the remainder of the island is divided between Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies) and the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak (the northern part of the island, formerly and collectively known as British Borneo). Sarawak became a British protectorate in 1888 (with its capital at Kuching), a Crown Colony in 1946, and eventually a part of Malaysia in 1963. The hot, humid climate is marked by a prolonged monsoon season, lasting generally from November to May. Primitive Dyaks, known for their intertribal warfare and head-hunting, continue to occupy the sparsely populated interior, while Malays predominate in the coastal regions. *Maugham, in company with his secretary and companion *Gerald Haxton, traversed the dangerous rivers (particularly Rajang, Baram, Limbang, and Batang Lupar), villages, and jungle trails of Sarawak (then a part of British North Borneo) in March and April 1921. At one point, traveling in a paddleboat with a group of convicts from the Simanggang jail, they encountered a ‘‘bore’’ (an inrush of water of tidal-wave proportions) and capsized. Such events, experiences, and characters reappear in Maugham’s third short story collection, *The Casuarina Tree (1926), most emphatically in *‘‘Before the Party,’’ *‘‘The Outstation,’’ and *‘‘The Yellow Streak.’’ Bibliography: Levey and Greenhall; Morgan; Webster’s.
BOUCICAULT, DIONYSIUS GEORGE (1859–1929). Son of the Irish-born playwright and actor Dionysius Lardner Boucicault (1820–1890) and the actress Agnes Kelly Robertson (1833–1916). Known as ‘‘Dot,’’ he married (1901) the comedienne Irene Vanbrugh (1872–1949). In 1901, *Charles Frohman hired him as the resident manager and principal director at the Duke of York’s Theatre, St. Martin’s Lane, where he remained until 1916. He directed all of the plays there between 1901 and 1916, among them *Maugham’s *Mrs. Dot (1908), *Penelope (1909), *Smith (1909), *Land of Promise (1914), and *Caroline (1916). He proved most tolerant of Maugham’s idiosyncrasies. Bibliography: Hartnoll.
12
THE BREAD WINNER: A COMEDY IN ONE ACT
THE BREAD-WINNER: A COMEDY IN ONE ACT (1930). A play produced at the Vaudeville, London, on 30 September, running for 158 performances. In this last of *Maugham’s drawing-room comedies, †Charles Laurence Battle, a middle-aged London stockbroker, carries the theme of a husband’s revolt against the marriage contract—a Nora Helmer (Ibsen’s A Doll’s House [1879]) in reverse and an offspring of †Charles Strickland (*The Moon and Sixpence [1919]. Discovering himself close to financial ruin, Charles allows himself to go bankrupt rather than to seek the assistance of others. For him, financial ruin means life and liberty. His pretentious wife †Margery and their parasitic teenage children, †Judy and Patrick Battle, realize that Charles is about to abandon them and escape to America; wife and daughter must, for the first time, react to male initiative. In the original production, Ronald Squire played Charles Battle; *Marie Lohr, Margery; Jack Hawkins Patrick; and Peggy Ashcroft, Judy. Bibliography: Collected Plays. II; Barnes; Calder (1972/1973), Cordell; Curtis; Mander and Mitchenson.
BRIGHT, REGINALD GOLDING (?–1941). *Maugham’s friend and drama agent from 1902 through 1933. A former civil servant and drama critic, he joined the agency of his brother, Addison Bright (Marbury and Bright). In 1901, he became the third husband of Mary Chavalita Dunne, feminist novelist (writing under the name ‘‘George Egerton’’) and friend of Maugham. He succeeded to head of the firm in 1906, following Addison’s suicide as the result of financial scandal. Bright would become the leading play agent of his day. He served as agent for such early Maugham plays as *Loaves and Fishes, *The Explorer, *Lady Frederick, *Mrs. Dot, *Smith, and *Jack Straw. For Lady Frederick (produced 1907), he secured an advance of $1,000 from the American impresario George C. Tyler to cover the rights in London and New York. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Curtis (1977); Morgan; Shattock.
BROOKS, JOHN ELLINGHAM (1864–1929). The sixteen-year-old *Maugham first met Brooks at the Grabau pension in Heidelberg in 1890. A *homosexual, with whom Maugham had his first such affair, he had studied at Cambridge, read for the bar, and then determined to devote himself to literature. He went to *Capri following the 1895 trial and conviction of *Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) for homosexual practices and spent the remainder of his life there. A literary failure, he was supported by an American wife, Beatrice Romaine Goddard (1874–1966?), a lesbian and coal-mine heiress from Pennsylvania; their marriage lasted little more than a year. A neighbor of Maugham on Capri and a leader among the homosexual establishment there, Brooks died on Capri of liver cancer. He had urged Maugham to imitate the florid style of the PreRaphaelite Walter Horatio Pater (1839–1894). Maugham, in turn, attacked him for his lack of energy and imagination, as well as for his intellectual laziness.
‘‘THE BURIED TALENT’’
13
Bright served as the model for the characters of Hayward in *Of Human Bondage (1915) and of †Thomas Wilson in *‘‘The Lotus-Eater’’ (1935). Bibliography: Benson; Calder (1989/1990); Robin Maugham (1978); Morgan.
BRUCE, KATE MARY MAUGHAM (?–1961). *Maugham’s favorite niece. Known as Kitty, she was the daughter of his brother Frederick and Helen Mary Romer Maugham. She married (1915) Robert Charles Bruce, a stockbroker and collector of jade and porcelain, who died prior to her, in 1953. She made an attempt at writing, with Maugham proving influential in publishing her first novel with *William Heinemann. Kate completed her last novel, Roses in December, only months before to her death. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
‘‘THE BUM’’ (1929, 1936). A short story published first in Cosmopolitan magazine and then in the collection *Cosmopolitans. The †Narrator, a writer and habitual reader, finds himself stranded in Vera Cruz, *Mexico, because of a dock strike. Sitting in an arcade by the square and having a drink, he spies a †Beggar, but he refuses to give him money. Returning to the arcade following an afternoon siesta, the Narrator sees the same Beggar. Two or three days later, the Narrator suddenly remembers the man; he had seen him in Rome, twenty years earlier, an enormously proud and vain twenty-two-year-old employee of the American Fruit Company in Central America who left his position to become a writer. When the Narrator gives the emaciated Beggar a banknote, the Beggar rolls it into a ball, flicks it to the buzzards, and disappears. Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
‘‘THE BURIED TALENT’’ (1934). A short story first published in Nash’s Magazine, March 1934. The story begins with †Sir Edward Convers, now His Britannic Majesty’s Minister Plenipotentiary to the King of *Siam, suddenly meeting up with †Blanche MacArdle, an old friend from Paris during the time when, at age twenty-two, he was in the French capital studying French to prepare for his diplomatic examinations. Blanche had turned away from a promising singing career to marry †Dr. Andrew MacArdle and go with him to the *Federated Malay States. She rekindles memories of Convers’ first love, †Charmian Pelter (later changed to Pelletier), a beautiful operatic singer who scaled the heights of fame but, at the same time, squandered her talent, turned to drink and descended as rapidly as she had risen. In the end, at age forty-three, she is found in Toulon harbor, with a knife in her back. The story really presents a contrast between Charmian and Blanche: the former threw her life away but, in the end, felt the fling had been worth it all; the latter chose the virtuous path, married Andrew, and buried her talent. Several days after her meeting with Converse, feeling Charmian’s death on her conscience, Blanche kills herself. Bibliography: Whitehead (1987).
14
BURMA
BURMA. Known officially as the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma, it presently comprises a collection of seven administrative divisions and seven states in Southeast Asia. The area is bounded on the north by India and China, on the east by China, Laos, and Thailand, on the south by Thailand and the Andaman Sea, and on the west by the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh, and *India. As a result of the three Burmese wars (1824–1826, 1852–1853, 1885–1886), the British acquired the entire area, including Mandalay. Burma existed as a province of British India—under a lieutenant governor until 1923, when the ministry raised it to a governor’s province. Separated from India in 1937 and made a Crown Colony, it was granted independence from Britain in 1948. *Maugham visited there with *Gerald Haxton, beginning late September and into December 1922, with stops at Rangoon, Mandalay, Taunggyi, the Salween River, and Kengtung. An account of this journey appears in *The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930). Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan; Webster’s.
C CAESAR’S WIFE (1919, 1922). A play, produced on 27 March 1919, that ran for 247 performances in London (Royalty Theatre) and seventy-two in New York; the London production starred C. Aubrey Smith and Fay Compton; in 1925, First National Pictures produced the film version under the title Infatuation, starring Percy Marmont and Corinne Griffith. *Maugham borrowed and then updated the story of the Princesse de Cleves and the Duc de Nemours from the novel La Princesse de Cleves (1678) by Madame Marie Madeleine de La Fayette (1634–1693); the young Princesse, married to an older man, falls in love with the young Duc, but she manages to control her passion and to refrain from illicit love. Maugham’s play focuses upon the young †Lady Violet Little, only recently married to †Sir Arthur Little, the British consular agent in Cairo and a man twice her age. Naturally, she falls in love with †Ronald Parry, her husband’s handsome young secretary and a first-rate Arabic scholar. Lady Violet attempts to control the situation by requesting Sir Arthur to post Ronald out of *Egypt, but Sir Arthur refuses on the grounds that Ronald, for the good of the British Empire, must remain where he is. In the end, Ronald uncovers a plot against Sir Arthur by Egyptian nationalists, while Lady Violet finally determines that she really loves and needs her husband. Any success the piece achieved resulted from Maugham’s skill in weaving two major love threads (the other being Ronald Parry’s sister’s lengthy infatuation for Sir Arthur) around major social and political issues of the day. Bibliography: Collected Plays. III; Brander; Curtis (1977, 1982); Dottin (1937); Loss (1987); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b).
CAKES AND ALE; OR, THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD (1930). A novel, *Maugham’s twelfth, published in London by *William Heinemann and
16
CAKES AND ALE; OR, THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD
in New York by Doubleday. The germ of the idea came from the grand ceremony at the funeral of *Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), whose ashes were borne at Westminster Abbey (after his heart had been buried elsewhere) by such politicians as Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) and Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) and by such literati as J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), *John Galsworthy (1867– 1933), *Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), and *Edmund Gosse (1845–1928). Maugham placed Hardy in the guise of the writer †Edward Driffield, while the actress Sue Jones supposedly served as the model for his wife, †Rosie Driffield. †Alroy Kear, the scheming and self-serving writer and lecturer, represented (on equal supposition) *Hugh Walpole and touched off a series of accusations and denials between Maugham and the English novelist. Set both in Kent and in the Bloomsbury district of Edwardian London, the novel introduces a group of low-level writers whose interests lay with turning a profit rather than in their art. Thus, the artistically worn-out Driffield clashes with the self-promoting Kear. All is seen through the eyes of the narrator, young †William Ashenden (supposedly Maugham), who himself struggles vainly to escape the pseudointellectualism and social narrow-mindedness of his times. In the end, a more mature Ashenden pardons the faults of those whom he had initially rejected, possibly because he realizes that, artistically, he is not so far removed from them. From an autobiographical point of view, the fifty-six-yearold Maugham may have seen himself as the model for all three characters, each representing a different stage in his own literary career: the young and idealistic Ashenden, the scheming Kear, and the spiritually tired Driffield. Early in the novel, Kear attempts to enlist young Ashenden in helping him to write the biography of the recently deceased Driffield. Kear, with backing from Driffield’s second wife, †Amy, seeks not the truth but a quick profit from falsifying facts for the popular market. He will ignore, for example, the artistic effect of Rosie, the first Mrs. Driffield, upon her husband. Ashenden, then rooted to the ideal function of art, refuses to help, claiming that only the truth will justly memorialize Driffield. From that point, Ashenden details his recollections of Edward Driffield and the writer’s first and second wives. The novel thus extends from Ashenden’s childhood and adolescence, through early adulthood, and on to middle age—from late Victorian England through the end of the Edwardian period. Rosie Driffield emerges as the most attractive character of the piece. Not only does she introduce young Ashenden to the joys of highly romantic and sexual experiences, but also she virtually forces him to escape from his unreasonable and provincial attitudes about the world beyond the village of Blackstable and the county of Kent. She forces him to understand, for instance, that in the realm of letters, the Alroy Kears actually exist and will actually succeed. In the end, although Rosie leaves her husband and Ashenden for another man (and a married one, no less), she has provided the artistic inspiration for both men. Kear’s biography of Edward Driffield will ignore her, but Ashenden comes to appre-
CAPRI
17
ciate Rosie as the authentic ‘‘Skeleton in the Cupboard.’’ Her lack of pretentiousness will eventually pull apart the thin facade of Kear’s distorted biography. Bibliography: Brander; Brophy; Brown (1970); Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Palmer; Pollock; Viswanath.
THE CAMEL’S BACK: A NEW FARCE IN THREE ACTS (1923). An unpublished play produced (after tryouts at Worcester and Springfield, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C.) at the Vanderbilt Theatre, New York, on 13 November 1923, closing after only fifteen performances. It reopened in London at the Playhouse, 31 January 1924, running for seventy-six performances. Violet Kemble Cooper played the lead in New York. The combination of hackneyed and weak plot and trite language proved boring for audiences. That lack of success on the stage has yielded little or no critical attention. The hackneyed plot of the piece spins its tiresome web about the repressive (but sometimes repressed) husband theme, specifically, the humorless and rumbling London barrister †Valentine Lefevre. He tries, in the end without success, to keep his widowed mother dependent on him, to prevent his daughter, †Enid Lefevre, from an engagement to the man she really loves, and to achieve domination over his dominating wife, †Hermione. Maugham blamed part of the failure of the piece on Violet Cooper’s inability to deliver the lines properly. Bibliography: Mander and Mitchenson (1955b).
THE CANADIAN (1926). A motion picture based on the play *The Land of Promise (1913) and produced by Paramount Studios; starred Thomas Meighan and Mona Palma. CAPRI. A four-square-mile island off the southern coast of *Italy, in the Bay of Naples, part of Napoli province. The cliffs on the east side rise to 900 feet, while its highest point, 1,923 feet, is on the west side. The Blue Grotto, on the north shore, is a cavern approximately 175 feet long and fifty feet high, renowned for its dazzling blue light inside. After the 1895 trial and conviction of *Oscar Wilde for practicing *homosexuality, *Maugham’s homosexual friend *John Ellingham Brooks went into permanent exile on Capri. Maugham first visited Brooks there in 1895 before it became popular for tourists (c.1903) and then (1907) completely overrun by expatriate homosexuals and lesbians. From that time he would vacation frequently on Capri; he spent the summer of 1897 there, writing *The Making of a Saint (1898). The island serves as the setting for Maugham’s short story *‘‘The Lotus Eater’’ (1935), where the characters spend a good portion of their time washing down Bel Paese figs with light Capri wine. Bibliography: Burt; Calder (1989/1990); Robin Maugham (1978); Morgan; Webster’s.
18
CARBUCCIA, HORACE DE
CARBUCCIA, HORACE DE (fl. 1920–1955). Wealthy Corsican publisher and fascist politician and a friend and neighbor of *Maugham on the Riviera. Fat and bald, he bragged that he had paid three million francs to gain election to the French Parliament. He edited the anti-Semitic right-wing paper Gringoire, a sheet reportedly subsidized by Mussolini (one of its reporters had interviewed Maugham in 1929), and he collaborated with the Germans during World War II. In 1930, he adapted Maugham’s *The Circle (1921) and *The Letter (1927) for the French stage. He and Maugham parted company when the latter defended the formation of the Franco-British Alliance that determined to aid Poland against the Germans. In the issue of Gringoire for 7 November 1942, he published an article, ‘‘Farewell to My British Friend’’ (Adieu a Mon Ami Anglais), declaring that Maugham’s story *‘‘The Treasure’’ (concerning a man who sleeps with his maid) really dealt with Maugham and his footman; he also claimed that Maugham smoked opium. In January 1950, he was sentenced by the French government to a five-year prison term for having been a German collaborator. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
CAROLINE (1916). See THE UNATTAINABLE. ‘‘CASUAL AFFAIR’’ (1934). A short story, most readily accessible in the collection *Creatures of Circumstance (1947). The †Narrator finds himself in the company of the district officer, †Arthur Low, on *Borneo. Low, in turn, relates an incident concerning †Lady Kastellan and her infidelity to her husband through her affair with †Jack Almond—who was once a promising clerk in the Foreign Office but who eventually dies from a combination of tuberculosis, opium, and starvation. Low finds Almond’s body, as well as a bundle of forty to fifty letters and a note that it be delivered to Lady Kastellan. The letters, of course, explicate the details of the tryst, complete with †Lord Kastellan’s threats against his wife and Jack. Low delivers the letters to Lady Kastellan and learns that she had, no doubt as the result of pressure from her husband and influential father, steeled her heart; she treats the matter of Jack Almond’s death in a most casual manner. Thus, Almond’s miserable death underscores the tragedy brought about when outside elements, as they will and must, destroy both love and a life. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance.
THE CASUARINA TREE: SIX STORIES (1926). A collection published by Doran and reprinted by Arno Press in 1977; issued in London by Collins in 1930 as The Letter: Stories of Crime. Includes *‘‘The Letter,’’ *‘‘Before the Party,’’ *‘‘The Outstation,’’ *‘‘The Yellow Streak,’’ *‘‘P. & O.,’’ and *‘‘Force of Circumstances.’’ Through these short stories, *Maugham revealed an exact picture of British life in the Far East, and the title accurately matches the general
CENTER FOR MAUGHAM STUDIES
19
thesis of the collection. Essentially, a casuarina tree—known also as a cassowary or Australian pine (or beefwood)—with its gray color and drooping twigs, has jointed stems, scalelike, whorled leaves, and small fruits grouped in woody, conelike structures. Its overall grimness contrasts starkly to the lushness of the vegetation surrounding it. For Maugham, who had a casuarina tree planted in his own lush garden at *Villa Mauresque, Cap Ferrat, it suggested the exiled European whose personality, temperament, and stamina proved unable to adapt to life in tropical climates. Bibliography: Cordell; Connolly.
CATALINA. A ROMANCE (1948). A novel, *Maugham’s last, published initially and serially in Harper’s magazine as ‘‘The Windmill,’’ then in a single volume by Doubleday (Garden City, New York) and Heinemann (London). The American edition shared the Book-of-the-Month Club selection with Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, while the first London printing ran to 50,000 copies. A reprinted edition appeared in 1978. Although the reviews of the novel proved essentially unfavorable, not all of the critical commentators grasped the underlying humor of the piece. Maugham set his trite and heavily borrowed tale in late fifteenth-century *Spain during the Inquisition. At the outset, the Blessed Virgin Mary appears in a vision to the titled character, †Catalina Orta y Perez, a very beautiful cripple, and tells her she will be healed by one of three brothers—he being the one who has best served God. The three candidates are †Blasco Suarez De Valero, Bishop of Segovia; *Manuel De Valero, a captain in the king’s armies; and †Martin De Valero, a good-natured farmer and baker, who, not unexpectedly, fulfills the prophetic assignment. Afterward, Catalina becomes the valuable object of intrachurch and interpolitical struggle and negotiations among Bishop Blasco de Valero, several heads of state, and †Dona Beatriz de San Domingo, the prioress of Castel Rodriguez and one of Maugham’s most mentally astute female characters. However, Catalina manages to extricate herself from a life of religion and marry her lover, †Diego Martinez. They join a group of strolling players; Catalina bears six children, while, during the intervals, rising to become a famous actress. The strength of the novel lies in its lengthy character portraits of Dona Biatriz, Bishop Blasco de Valero, and Catalina’s scholarly and high-spirited uncle, †Domingo Perez. Further, beneath its overly simple plot and witty language lies an analysis of the age-old struggle for political power, both within and between church and state, that ignores, totally, humanitarian considerations and values. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1974).
CENTER FOR MAUGHAM STUDIES. Founded by Professor Klaus W. Jonas (1928–), former chair of the German Department at the University of Pittsburgh, in the fall of 1950 at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New
20
CHAMBRUN, JACQUES
Jersey, and formally opened on 5 February 1951. Jonas’ own collection of Maughamiana formed its core, to which were added such items as original manuscripts and autographed first editions; letters from *Maugham; the complete holograph of Of Human Bondage and its unpublished forerunner, ‘‘The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey’’; the manuscript of *Strictly Personal; and translations of Maugham’s works into sixteen languages, including Japanese and Korean. Jonas, a friend of Maugham, first exhibited Maughamiana in 1951 at Rutgers and continued to do so for the next fifteen years. Yale University housed the center from 1955 to 1957; in November 1957, Jonas moved it to Pittsburgh. It closed its activities in 1965, the collection being transferred to the Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Bibliography: Jonas (1959).
CHAMBRUN, JACQUES (fl. 1935–1955). A New York literary agent engaged by *Maugham from 1941 to 1948. A person of taste, charm, and intelligence but also one who did not readily, willingly, or fairly pay the writers under contract to him. He admitted to taking full advantage of Maugham’s name and popularity to obtain contracts with other writers. Further, he charged Maugham (and other writers) exorbitant commissions, ranging from twenty to thirty percent. The break came when Maugham discovered that Chambrun had been holding more than $30,000 in royalties owed to the writer. Bibliography: Robin Maugham (1978); Morgan.
CHANNON, HENRY (1897–1958). Popularly known as ‘‘Chips,’’ a wealthy Chicago *homosexual and London social figure, son of Harry Channon, a Chicago businessman, and Vesta Westover. Short and red-haired, he devoted himself to repudiating America and becoming Anglicized. He lived in Paris prior to World War I and served with the American Red Cross there in 1917. Following the war, he spent four years at Christ Church, Oxford, where he earned the M.A. Afterward, he converted to Catholicism. In 1933, purely for appearance, Channon married Lady Honour Guinness, the eldest daughter of the second earl of Iveagh, and they outfitted an elaborate mansion in Belgrave Square, London; the marriage ended in divorce in 1945. He served as private secretary to R.A.B. Butler, the under secretary of state for foreign affairs (1938–1941) and also occupied a seat in Parliament as a Conservative for Southend-on-Sea (1935–1958). He was knighted in 1957. Politically, he favored Neville Chamberlain, opposed *Winston Churchill, sympathized with *Germany, and outwardly hated Jews. A vain and proud man, he nonetheless moved in the highest circles of English society and politics. Channon and *Maugham could well have met as early as 1926, when both served as volunteer special constables during the coal strike of May 1926. They most certainly met in London at a luncheon hosted by Emerald Cunard in 1935. However, they were never particularly close friends. There have always been
CHIARELLI, LUIGI
21
strong suggestions and parallels to indicate that Maugham based at least parts of the character of †Elliott Templeton in *The Razor’s Edge (1944) on Channon. Bibliography: Calder, (1972/1973); Morgan; Who Was Who.
CHAPLIN, SIR CHARLES SPENCER (1889–1977). The full and formal name of the London-born film actor, director, mime, and producer, Charlie Chaplin. He learned comedy from Fred Karno, and the two went to Hollywood in 1914. There, Chaplin perfected his pantomime roles in silent films as a tramp in baggy trousers, outturned feet, cane, and a bowler hat. The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925)—silent films—City Lights (1931), and The Great Dictator (1940)—in sound—may be numbered among his most popular productions. He received knighthood in 1973. Maugham met Chaplin in *Hollywood sometime between December 1920 and mid-February 1921. They met again in New York in October 1923 and went to the theater together. Maugham immediately became impressed with the comic ability and popularity of Chaplin, as well as appreciative of the melancholy that the writer believed lurked behind his humor. Bibliography: Writer’s Notebook; Crystal; Morgan.
CHARMING SINNERS (1929). A motion picture produced by Paramount Studios and based on the play *The Constant Wife (1926). CHIARAMELLO, ANNETTE (fl. 1926–1965). *Maugham’s Italian cook at Villa Mauresque, whom he had elevated (c.1927) from kitchen maid. She specialized in brie en gelee (with the crust removed), avocado ice cream laced with Barbados rum, and avocado pears with ordinary French dressing (oil and vinegar, salt, pepper, a little mustard, and a chopped herb [tarragon]). She also had responsibility for the shopping. Physically, she was equipped with an ample derriere. In his will, Maugham bequeathed her £2,000. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
CHIARELLI, LUIGI (1884–1947). The Italian playwright who has been regarded as the principal representative of the Italian theater of the grotesque. Born in Trani, he worked as a journalist before leaving that vocation for the stage. His plays come forth, generally, as satires upon a bored and cynical society in which the excessive leisure of persons resides within a moral and intellectual vacuum. In his principal production, the comedy La Maschera e il Volto (1916), Chiarelli explores the inadequacy, corruption, and complete lack of authenticity in social human beings. In such a grotesque society, life assumes a mask that is ultimately and universally accepted and tolerated as being the true face of reality.
22
CHINA
*Maugham adapted but never published Chiarelli’s La Maschera e il Volto as *The Mask and the Face (1933). Bibliography: Gassner and Quinn; Hartnoll.
CHINA. *Maugham’s first extensive trip to China occurred during September– December 1919. By then, the Manchu dynasty, which had ruled since 1644, had been overthrown (1911). As a result, pigtails were abolished, and the calendar reformed. Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) held the presidency briefly, appointed Chiang K’ai-shek (1887–1975) his military adviser, and then (1912) turned over his office to Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), who reverted to a dictator. A further visit by Maugham occurred in 1922–1923. He really ignored, on both occasions, the substance of Chinese life and culture—its language, drama, and religion; instead, he preferred to focus upon those Britons employed there in various religious, political, and commercial positions. Therefore, the scenes and characters gathered from this journey found their way into *East of Suez (1922), *On a Chinese Screen (1922), *The Painted Veil (1925), *The Narrow Corner (1932), and a variety of short stories. The spectacular opening scene of East of Suez appears to provide employment for as many actors as can be crowded on a stage, rather than to depict any true sense of the nation or its people. Maugham scattered Chinese men, women, boys, girls, children, and coolies—both with and without names and more than one can possibly count— throughout his fiction and drama as though they were merely decorative and lifeless paper dolls. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1977); Rogal.
‘‘THE CHOICE OF AMYNTAS’’ (1899). A short story, written while *Maugham was still a medical student at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London; published in *Orientations. †Amyntas, the eldest son of †Peter, the west country schoolmaster, and †Mrs. Peter, leaves England and travels to Cadiz, Spain, where he loses his money and virginity to the first †Spanish Lady whom he meets. Nonetheless, he remains in the country, searching for sustenance and his own identity, and becomes involved in an adventure that resembles a fairy tale in combination with echoes from Homer and Omar Khayyam. Amyntas finds himself alone on a lake, the current of which carries him into a grotto. There he meets four young Moorish †Maidens who represent, respectively, power, wealth, beauty and wisdom, and love. He chooses the last, the Lady of Love, but also chooses to remain away from England. Critical commentators generally agree that Amyntas is an early prototype of †Charles Strickland, †Larry Darrell, †Alec Mackenzie, and all the rest of Maugham’s fictional and dramatic characters who prefer to live anywhere but in England. Bibliography: Orientations; Seventeen Lost Stories; Curtis (1974, 1982).
CHURCHILL, SIR WINSTON LEONARD SPENCER
23
CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (1939). A novel, published in London in February and in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday, Doran, and Company in October; reprinted by Arno Press in 1978; made into a film, with the original title, by Universal Pictures in 1944. *Maugham worked on the book mostly during the summer of 1938 at *Villa Mauresque. In the year of its publication, the book sold 20,000 copies in England alone, while Redbook magazine purchased the serialization rights for $16,000. He based part of the piece on the December 1932 trial (which he attended) in Paris of Guy Albert Davin, who received a life prison sentence on French Guiana for the murder of Richard Wall, his rich American friend with whom he had engaged in sexual relations. The writer returned to Paris in May 1937 for additional research on the issue of the French penal system. From another view, the novel continued earlier Maugham themes related to the notion that an innocent and naive English youth could gain an education from even a short visit to the corrupt Continent. On its highest level, Christmas Holiday represents a political allegory on the eve of world war: the liberal middle classes that had controlled and governed England for so long found themselves under siege from revolutionaries and extremists; failed artists had become revolutionaries and radicals; the old order was about to collapse, to be overrun by fascists, Nazis, and communists. Maugham relates the story of young †Charley Mason, naive, insulated, and from an upper-middle-class family, who spends five days on Christmas holiday in Paris. There he contacts †Simon Fenimore, his oldest friend, who currently works as a Paris correspondent for a London newspaper. A socialist and then a communist at school, Simon has now become a full-fledged right-wing reactionary—harsh, cynical, and unscrupulous. In him, the reader observes the development of the political totalitarian. At the Serail, a brothel, Charley meets and becomes involved with †Lydia Berger, a White Russian woman of the world and known professionally as Princess Olga. Her husband, †Robert Berger, has been sentenced to fifteen years of penal servitude at St. Laurent de Maroni, French Guiana, for the murder of †Teddie Jordan, a *homosexual English bookmaker in Paris, a former jockey, and a suspected drug trafficker. Before his marriage to Lydia, Robert himself had narrowly escaped prison for stealing cars and smuggling heroin from Belgium into *France. Throughout the five days, Charley Mason confronts challenges to his social status and to the complacency of his life in England. However much he might have learned, he has solved nothing—as proven by his sleeping with Lydia but retaining his virginity. When he returns home, Charley is bewildered; he can conclude only that the bottom has fallen out from his world. Outside of the novel, the war that will follow will prove him right. Bibliography: Brander; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Morgan; Viswanath; Wescott; Whitehead (1987).
CHURCHILL, SIR WINSTON LEONARD SPENCER (1874–1965). British politician, writer, prime minister (1940–1945, 1951–1955), and the recipient of
24
THE CIRCLE. A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS
the Nobel Prize in literature in 1953 for The Second World War (six volumes, 1948–1954). His published works include two narratives (1898, 1899) of his military experiences in *Egypt and another (1900) from his journalistic coverage of the Boer War in South Africa (where he was taken prisoner). He also authored (1906–1907) a biography of his father, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill (1849–1895), seventh duke of Marlborough, and another (1933–1938) of his ancestor, John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), as well as a four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–1958). In 1958, along with *Maugham and the poet Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964), Churchill was elected a vice president of the *Royal Society of Literature. Churchill and Maugham (ten months Churchill’s elder) had been friends for over fifty years. They first met around 1908 or 1909 at the country house of Henry and Dorothy Allhusen in Stoke Poges near Windsor, where they played golf and agreed never to be funny at each other’s expense. During his later years, the former prime minister resided near, and frequently visited, *Villa Mauresque. A common friend and gossip labeled Maugham, *Lord Beaverbrook, and *Churchill as the three wicked old men of the Riviera; indeed, the London artist *Graham Sutherland (1903–1980) painted separate portraits of all three (1949, 1951, 1955, respectively). As did Maugham, Churchill stuttered, although not as pronounced, no doubt controlled by a long life of public speaking. Maugham burned most of his letters from Churchill in 1958. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Crystal; DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
THE CIRCLE. A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS (1921). A play (which *Maugham always thought of as his best) written in 1919 and produced at the Haymarket, London, on 3 March 1921, starring Fay Compton, Allan Aynesworth, and Ernest Thesinger. The first of Maugham’s plays to receive ‘‘boos’’ from the audience, principally because they could not understand all of the lines, and the elopement scene that concluded the piece did not come forth clearly. Nonetheless, it ran for 181 performances and grossed some $20,000 per week. In New York, the piece opened the same year and ran 175 performances. It was published by Doran in London and New York (1921) and reissued in London (1948) as part of Samuel French’s acting editions. A motion picture under the original title appeared from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925; that same studio remade it in 1930 as *Strictly Unconventional. Horace de Carbuccia adapted The Circle for the French stage in 1930; there was a London revival in 1931; John Gielgud revived the play in 1944, as did George Withers in 1977. Some thirty years before the time of the play, †Lord Hughie Porteus, then a promising young politician, eloped with the beautiful †Lady Catherine (Kitty) Champion-Cheney, wife of †Clive Champion-Cheney (himself then a member of Parliament) and the mother of a five-year-old son, †Arnold Champion-Cheney (now a member of Parliament). After having lived, unmarried, in Florence, *Italy, Kitty and Lord Hughie, no longer young and attractive, return to England.
‘‘THE CLOSED SHOP’’
25
†Elizabeth Champion-Cheney, Arnold’s attractive wife, has tired of her husband after three years of marriage and wants to run away with †Edward Luton (known as Teddy), the aggressive manager of a rubber estate in Malaya. Clive advises Arnold to prevent Elizabeth’s departure by allowing her to choose between a loveless but secure life as it exists and the potential for long-term exile in the future, the latter represented by the aged Kitty and Lord Hughie. Arnold almost succeeds, but Teddy Luton proves too persuasive; in the end, the two run off in Lord Hughie Porteus’s automobile, leaving Clive Champion-Cheney dispirited because his strategy has failed. Although a major strength of the piece lies in the farcical manner by which Maugham developed portraits of Lady Katherine Champion-Cheney and Lord Hughie Porteus, the title identifies the thesis that gave it the social relevance necessary for its stage success. Certainly, Elizabeth and Teddy basically repeat the actions of Lady Katherine and Lord Hughie, thus symbolizing the full circle of events. However, the younger couple goes about it in the modern manner, through their own decision, not by following the examples set by others—especially their elders. Maugham further clarifies the symbol of the circle by connecting the three distinct pairs of characters: Lady Katherine and Elizabeth, Arnold and Clive, and Teddy and Lord Hughie. Each pair houses both a like and an opposite; each contains not only past and present but also a need for serious consideration of the future; each contains an element in the traditional social struggle between romance and reality. The key element remains, though, in the audience’s ability to appreciate the deep differences between Kitty and Elizabeth, differences that Maugham has carefully drawn throughout the play. As usual, the playwright continues his discussions from previous fiction and drama about wealth, social position, love, and marriage. Of greater interest, however, is that Maugham permits the existence of a normal heterosexual love relationship to nurture and to thrive. In the best of theatrical and dramatic traditions, he holds on to his audience until the very end of the play. Not until Elizabeth and Teddy speed away in Porteus’s car does Maugham admit that such a relationship, in a truly modern society, has a chance for success. Bibliography: Collected Plays. II; Six Comedies; Barnes; Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/ 1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Dobrinsky (1976); ‘‘Les Debuts’’; Dottin (1937); Fielden (1956); Gassner and Quinn; Innes; Loss (1987/1988); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Savini; Stokes; Sutton.
‘‘THE CLOSED SHOP’’ (1926). A short story published in *Cosmopolitans. This light entertainment unfolds in a country on the American continent that liberalizes its divorce law whereby a woman can reside there without her husband for thirty days, pay $100, and thus end her marriage. As a result, the capital of this nation soon had a steady flow of women who took up residence at the Grand Hotel, owned by †Don Agosto. However, as a consequence of the new law, the young men of the city now obtain certain free services for which formerly they had to pay hard cash. Further, the occupants of the Grand Hotel
26
COLEFAX, SYBIL
threaten the economic well-being of the established bordellos. Three of the owners of such houses—†Madame Coralie, †Carmencita, and †La Gorda—call upon the new president, †Don Manuel, demanding that he declare the divorce law invalid and then drive away the unskilled foreign labor at the Grand Hotel. In his wisdom, Don Manuel amends the law to require that a woman seeking divorce must bring with her a husband or a male friend. In the end, economic stability returns to the local houses, and the nation’s prosperity is maintained. Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over.
COLEFAX, SYBIL (1872–?). Wife of a prominent English jurist, Sir Arthur Colefax (d.1936) and a reigning London hostess of the 1920s and 1930s. She resided at Argyll House, No. 211 King’s Road, Chelsea, designed in 1723 by the Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni. For thirty years (1906–1936) the house served as a gathering place for political, literary, and artistic persons. After 1936, she resided at 19 Lord North Street and entertained during the height of the German bombing of London (1937–1941). Lady Colefax competed with *Syrie Maugham as a hostess and decorator. *Maugham proved a regular visitor when in London; Lady Colefax, in turn, stayed as a guest at the *Mauresque on several occasions. There are textual suggestions that she may well have served as a model for †Amy Strickland in *The Moon and Sixpence (1919). Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan; Who Was Who (1936).
COLLECTIONS. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, houses a *Maugham archive, while various of his manuscripts and papers may be found at the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York (City) Public Library; the Lily Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington; Stanford University, Palo Alto (Stanford), California; the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Fales Collection, New York University, New York; the Butler Library, Columbia University, New York; the Olin Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey; the University of Arkansas Library, Fayetteville; South Carolina Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia; among the Beaverbrook Papers, House of Lords Records Office, London. Maugham’s 1,300–volume book collection and the manuscripts of *Liza of Lambeth and *Catalina (his first and last novels) reside in the King’s School, Canterbury, Kent. COLLES, WILLIAM MORRIS (1855–1926). An Irish barrister and *Maugham’s first literary agent (1897–1905). After attending Cambridge and being admitted to the bar in 1880, he founded the Authors’ Syndicate in 1889, at 4 Portugal Street, London. Big, burly, and bearded, with a wheezy, infectious
COMPTON, VIRGINIA LILLIAN EMMELINE [FAY]
27
laugh, he proved to be entirely reputable. In addition to Maugham, he also represented *George Gissing and *Arnold Bennett. Maugham dismissed Colles in July 1905, believing that the agent had failed to press *William Heinemann to advertise and promote *The Merry-Go-Round. Colles, in turn, sued Maugham in December 1909 for commission on the drama version of *The Explorer and received an award of twenty-one pounds and ten shillings. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
‘‘THE COLONEL’S LADY’’ (1946). A short story published in the initial piece in the collection *Creatures of Circumstance. In 1948, R. C. Sherriff adapted *‘‘The Facts of Life,’’ *‘‘The Alien Corn,’’ *‘‘The Kite,’’ and ‘‘The Colonel’s Lady’’ into a film, *Quartet (London, J. Arthur Rank). *Maugham filters the uncomfortable relationship between literature and ordinary life through †Eva Katherine Hamilton Peregrine, the drab and timid wife of a retired officer; she turns to poetry to express her grand passion. The settled life of the fifty-year-old †George Peregrine, a gentleman farmer, becomes upset because of the publication of his wife’s poems, and he vainly attempts to stifle Evie’s literary ambitions. However, the verse wins the day; Colonel Peregrine finds himself demoted to being ‘‘E. K. Hamilton’s’’ husband, and he forces himself to read Evie’s poems. Therein he discovers his wife’s illicit and passionate love affair with a much younger man. He realizes that the real Evie exists not as his wife but as the poet on the pages of her volume. When consulting with his solicitor about the possibility of divorce, he finally realizes that Evie exercised considerable courage in masking her emotions and that all of his previous assumptions about life have been threatened by his wife’s creativity. However, he still cannot understand what the young man saw in Evie. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance; Curtis (1974).
COMPTON, VIRGINIA LILLIAN EMMELINE [FAY] (1894–1978). Daughter of the actor Edward (1854–1918) and Virginia Frances Bateman Compton (1853–1940), as well as the sister of the novelist *Sir Edward Compton MacKenzie (1883–1972). The distinguished English actress debuted in the 1911 Follies of her first husband, Henry Gabriel Pelissier (1874–1913), at the Apollo Theatre, London, followed (1914) by an American tour and by her role in Peter Pan in 1918. She demonstrated consistent success on the popular stage from 1920 through 1944, toured Europe, and performed for the Old Vic in Shakespeare and *Oscar Wilde (1953–1959). She was also married to Lauri de Frece (d.1921), the actor Leon Quartermaine (1876–?), and Ralph Michael. Compton played the lead roles in *Maugham’s *Caesar’s Wife (1919, 247 performances), *The Circle (1921, 181 performances), and *The Constant Wife
28
CONNOLLY, CYRIL VERNON
(1927). According to Maugham (in 1924), ‘‘She is a beautiful creature, a slut by nature, a good actress, and has a considerable hold on the British public.’’ Bibliography: Crystal; DNB; Hartnoll; Morgan.
CONNOLLY, CYRIL VERNON (1903–1974). English journalist and essayist, born in Coventry, Warwickshire, and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Prior to becoming the literary editor of The Observer (1942–1943), he and the poet Stephen Spender (1909–1995) had founded (1939) the literary review Horizon, which Connolly edited until it closed in 1950. He published five collections of his essays between 1938 and 1966, as well as a novel, The Rock Pool (1935). Connolly may be numbered as one of *Maugham’s friends and regular visitors to the *Villa Mauresque. In 1936, he rejected an essay submitted to Horizon by Maugham, who later revised it as ‘‘The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story.’’ Connolly, who consistently reviewed Maugham’s work, considered *The Casuarina Tree (1926), *Ashenden (1928), and *Ah King (1933) among the one hundred key books of the modern period (1880–1950), and he generally held Maugham’s fiction—particularly *Cakes and Ale and *The Razor’s Edge— in the highest esteem. Bibliography: Connolly; DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
THE CONSTANT WIFE: A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS (1927). A play performed at the Maxine Elliott Theatre, New York, on 29 November 1926 (preceded by a tryout in Cleveland, Ohio, on 1 November), starring Ethel Barrymore and C. Aubrey Smith, running for 295 performances, followed by a oneyear road tour. It opened at the Strand Theatre, London, on 6 April 1927, produced by *Basil Dean and starring *Fay Compton, and ran for seventy performances. Doran published the piece in New York and London in 1927. Ruth Chatterton starred in a 1937 revival, first in Brighton and then (in the same year) in London for thirty-six performances; a second London revival opened in 1946 for twenty-six performances, while Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982) starred in another revival in 1965. In 1929, Paramount Studios adapted the piece as a motion picture under the title *Charming Sinners. The play itself revolves around the problems of the marriage contract and the various means, other than divorce, of circumventing its principles. †Constance Middleton discovers that her husband, the surgeon †John Middleton, has involved himself with her best friend, †Marie-Louise Durham. Rather than engage in an affair of her own, she determines to seek financial and emotional independence. In the end, as she prepares to leave with an old flame, †Bernard Kersal, for holiday in Italy, John exclaims that she need not come back. However, at the last moment, he changes his mind and tells her that he shall welcome her return. Thus, Constance achieves all that she wants: marriage and independence.
CORNELL, KATHARINE
29
Constance Middleton’s mother, †Mrs. Culver, carries the banner for tradition. She believes that if a man neglects his wife, the fault lies with the wife. Further, she maintains that women need to hold on to their homes, their names, and their positions, closing their eyes when they uncover something—such as their husbands’ extramarital affairs—that they were not meant to see. For Maugham, daughter Constance represents both a modification of, and a compromise to, her mother’s position. In the final analysis, critical commentary generally agreed that Constance Middleton served as the model for real-life English women of the future, and thus *Maugham laid the groundwork for what would come later in the social comedies of *Noel Coward, particularly Private Lives (1930). Bibliography: Barnes; Brander; Curtis (1974); Curtis and Whitehead; Innes; Loss (1987/1988); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b).
‘‘THE CONSUL’’ (1922). A short story, actually another of *Maugham’s anecdotes to support the notion that the English cannot adjust to life outside England; published in *On a Chinese Screen. It concerns †Mr. Pete, an official in the consular service in *China, an ardent collector of everything, and a bachelor. He receives a call from an Englishwoman married to a Chinese—formerly †Miss Lambert, now †Mrs. Yu. She discovers that †Mr. Yu, her husband, keeps more than one wife, but she would rather continue the arrangement of living with Yu, his mother, and his other wife than accept Pete’s advice and return to England. In fact, although convinced that the two Chinese women are trying to poison her, Miss Lambert remains firm. ‘‘There’s something in the way that his hair grows on his forehead that I can’t help liking.’’ For his part, the frustrated Pete can only admit, ‘‘Women are simply bloody.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; On a Chinese Screen.
COOPER, DAME GLADYS CONSTANCE (1888–1971). English actress, born in London, the most popular of her time and noted for her beauty. She married Herbert Buckmaster, a wealthy London socialite, and afterward became comanager (with Frank Curzon) of the Playhouse, London, during 1917–1928, then sole manager from 1928 to 1933. *Maugham first met her in 1908 at the Royalty Theatre, Dean Street, London. She starred in Maugham’s *Home and Beauty (1919, for 235 performances), as †Leslie Crosbie in *The Letter (1927, for 338 performances), in *The Sacred Flame (for eight months until the birth of her child), and as †Kitty Fane in *The Painted Veil (1931). Bibliography: DNB; Freedley and Reeves; Morgan.
CORNELL, KATHARINE (1893–1974). A leading American actress. Born in Berlin, *Germany, the daughter of a Buffalo, New York, theater manager, she was educated in New York City and made her stage debut with the Washington Square Players in 1916. After her marriage to producer/director Guthrie McClintic (d.1961) in 1921, she became best known for her role as Elizabeth Barrett
30
COSMOPOLITANS: VERY SHORT STORIES
in the American production (1931) of Laurence Housman’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1930), in which she appeared under her own management. In New York, she played †Constance Middleton in a late 1940s production of *Maugham’s *The Constant Wife (1926) and †Leslie Crosbie in the dramatic version of his *The Letter (1927). However, she refused (c.1951) the title role in *S. N. Behrman’s stage adaptation (1952) of Maugham’s short story *‘‘Jane’’ (1923, 1931). Maugham did not meet Cornell until 1942 at a clambake on Martha’s Vineyard. Bibliography: Freedley and Reeves; Hartnoll; Morgan.
COSMOPOLITANS: VERY SHORT STORIES (1936). A collection of twentynine (short) short stories, each originally between 1,200 and 1,500 words, published in February; written for Cosmopolitan magazine between 1923 and 1929. *Maugham received, in 1923, $2,500 per story for each of the first eight of them. Includes *‘‘The Ant and the Grasshopper,’’ *‘‘The Bum,’’ *‘‘The Closed Shop,’’ *‘‘The Dream,’’ *‘‘The End of the Flight,’’ *‘‘The Escape,’’ *‘‘The Four Dutchmen,’’ *‘‘French Joe,’’ *‘‘A Friend in Need,’’ *‘‘German Harry,’’ *‘‘The Happy Man,’’ *‘‘Home,’’ *‘‘In a Strange Land,’’ *‘‘The Judgment Seat,’’ *‘‘Louise,’’ *‘‘The Luncheon,’’ *‘‘The Man with the Scar,’’ *‘‘Mayhew,’’ *‘‘Mr. Know-All,’’ *‘‘The Poet,’’ *‘‘The Portrait of a Gentleman,’’ *‘‘The Promise,’’ *‘‘Raw Material,’’ *‘‘Salvatore,’’ *‘‘The Social Sense,’’ *‘‘Straight Flush,’’ *‘‘A String of Beads,’’ *‘‘The Verger,’’ *‘‘The Wash-Tub.’’ Bibliography: Brophy; Greene; Morgan.
‘‘COUSIN AMY’’ (1908). In this early short story (more of a sketch, perhaps), *Maugham develops the character of †Amy, the daughter of the †Narrator’s grandmother’s nephew by marriage. At age forty-two or forty-three, she lives in the country, growing stout and claiming to be a food reformer and a suffragist. The Narrator meets her in Piccadilly, and she arranges that he take her to dine at the expensive Ritz, during which he discovers her huge and expensive appetite. Aside from some interesting dialogue, the piece never extends beyond the observations of Amy’s idiosyncrasies. Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories.
COWARD, NOEL PIERCE (1899–1973). London-born English playwright, actor, producer, director, and composer of songs. He gained a significant literary reputation for his wit, sophistication, and unpretentiousness, principally because his work represents the totality of tolerance and decency. His plays focus on witty and stylish people who act in accordance with unconventional morals. Groups of his dramatic characters may have difficulty living together, but they experience even greater difficulties living apart from one another; thus, his characters both accept and defy social convention. He is best known for Private Lives (1930) and Blithe Spirit (1941).
CREATURES OF CIRCUMSTANCE
31
Although both Coward and *Maugham competed for audiences on the London stage during the 1920s and 1930s, Coward remained friends with both Maugham and his wife, Syrie. He dedicated his first serious play (and a flop), Point Valaine (1934), to Maugham; in the play Maugham serves as the model for Mortimer Quinn. Maugham also served as the model for the cynical novelist John Blair-Kennedy in Coward’s South Sea Bubble (1956). Maugham wrote a preface for the American edition of Coward’s Bitter Sweet and Other Plays, but Coward refused to contribute to a proposed Festschrift to celebrate Maugham’s eightieth birthday (1954). Coward became angry at Maugham when the latter published ‘‘Looking Back’’ (1962), a series of articles that attacked his former wife, *Syrie. Coward retaliated with a play, A Song of Twilight (1966, four months after Maugham’s death), modeling the main character (whom he himself played), the popular novelist and playwright Sir Hugo Latymer, after Maugham. Bibliography: Barnes; DNB; Morgan.
‘‘THE CREATIVE IMPULSE’’ (1926, 1931). A short story, written and published separately in 1926, then the last piece in the 1931 *Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular. *Maugham filters his satire through †Mrs. Albert Forrester, who has already published six volumes of verse under Latin titles, for example, Felicitas, Pax Maris, Aes Triplex, as well as odes to President Fallieres and to Woodrow Wilson. She surrounds herself with a circle of literary professionals, much like the eighteenth-century French salon. Those humorless and totally false psuedointellects, headed by †Clifford Boyleston and representing the literary cream of the Chelsea and Bloomsbury groups, as well as assorted foreigners, bear the brunt of Maugham’s satire. When her lowbrow, boorish, but hardworking husband, †Albert Forrester—an avid reader of detective novels and a stamp collector—runs off with the cook, †Mrs. Bulfinch, Mrs. Forrester rises to the occasion with her most successful book, The Achilles Statue, a detective story. Bibliography: Complete Stories. I. East and West; First Person Singular; Cordell; Curtis (1974).
CREATURES OF CIRCUMSTANCE (1947). *Maugham’s last collection of short stories, containing fifteen pieces. The majority had appeared earlier in magazines, but Maugham revised them for this volume. Includes *‘‘Appearance and Reality,’’ *‘‘A Casual Affair,’’ *‘‘The Colonel’s Lady,’’ ‘‘The Episode,’’ *‘‘Flotsam and Jetsam,’’ *‘‘The Happy Couple,’’ *‘‘The Kite,’’ *‘‘A Man from Glasgow,’’ *‘‘The Mother,’’ *‘‘The Point of Honour,’’ *‘‘The Romantic Young Lady,’’ *‘‘The Sanatorium,’’ *‘‘The Unconquered,’’ *‘‘Winter Cruise,’’ and *‘‘A Woman of Fifty.’’ The volume also includes a preface in which Maugham defends the appearance of short stories in popular magazines and underscores his own function as a storyteller.
32
CRIMINAL LAW AMENDMENT ACT
CRIMINAL LAW AMENDMENT ACT (1885–1967). Sponsored in part by Henry Du Pre Labouchere (1828–1904), Radical member of Parliament for Northampton (1880–1905), the Criminal Law Amendment Act concerned itself principally with the elimination of the white slave traffic in England, as well as raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen and the age of abduction from sixteen to eighteen. Thus, it provided significantly for the legal protection of women. However, Labouchere’s specific contribution, Section XI, focused upon the prohibition of indecent relations between consenting adult males, labeling such acts misdemeanors and forcing upon the guilty maximum prison terms of two years (Labouchere initially wanted a maximum of seven years) with or without hard labor. This statute remained in effect until 1967 (a full two years after *Maugham’s death), when the Sexual Offences Act erased the illegality of *homosexuality between consenting adults. The 1885 act, nonetheless, became the legal instrument by which to try the poet and playwright *Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and then cause him to spend two years (25 May 1895–19 May 1897) in British prisons—first at Pentonville, then at Wandsworth and Reading before being returned to Pentonville. When, in November 1915, Maugham’s first companion and secretary, *Gerald Haxton, was discovered in a hotel room in Covent Garden with a man named John Lindsell, both stood trial under Section XI of the amendment. The court voted for acquittal. Ultimately, Section XI forced men such as Maugham to seek safety in unhappy and unsatisfactory marriages and caused them to spend considerable periods of time outside Great Britain, particularly in Paris and on the Riviera. Further, any open discussion of homosexuality or defense of homosexuals proved, for them, out of the question. Bibliography: Ellmann; Ensor; Hart-Davis; Morgan.
CROWLEY, EDWARD ALEXANDER [ALEISTER] (1875–1947). An eccentric (and second-rate) poet, his family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren. He bore the labels of student of black magic, practitioner of yoga, smoker of hashish, mountaineer, and self-proclaimed religious prophet. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he met the Irish painter *Gerald Kelly (whose sister, Rose, Crowley would marry). He adopted the first name of ‘‘Aleister’’ in 1898 and later joined Kelly in Paris (c.1901) as part of a bohemian group. There, in 1904, *Maugham met him. Crowley inherited a family fortune, which he spent on ‘‘research’’ into the occult and the publication of his verse. The British press generally looked upon him as the wickedest man in the world. The character of †Oliver Haddo in Maugham’s novel *The Magician (1908) appears to have been, for the most part, an exaggerated model of Crowley, who interested and amused Maugham. For his part, Crowley did not appreciate the creation and immediately (first, in a review published in Vanity Fair, then later in his autobiography) accused the novelist of plagiarism and invasion of privacy. According to his usual methods, Maugham may also have patterned parts of the
‘‘CUPID AND THE VICAR OF SWALE’’
33
character of the eccentric poet †Cronshaw, in *Of Human Bondage (1915), after Crowley, but the evidence for that is not terribly strong. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1974/1977); Morgan.
CUNARD, EMERALD (1872–1942?). A prominent London socialite and hostess of the 1920s and 1930s. Born Maude Burke in San Francisco, she came to England and became the mistress of the Anglo-Irish novelist and playwright George Moore (1852–1933). In 1895, she married Sir Bache Cunard (1852– 1926), a grandson of the founder of the well-known shipping line, from whom she separated in 1911. She changed her name to ‘‘Emerald’’ in 1926 and shortly thereafter fell in love with the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Cunard despised *homosexuals (whom she called ‘‘popinjays’’) but had no suspicions of *Maugham’s inclinations in that direction. For his part, Maugham met *Henry (Chips) Channon in 1935 at one of her touted lunches; she proved to have been one of Channon’s social sponsors. The novelist had a second meeting with *Glenway Wescott at another such event that she hosted in 1941. Bibliography: DNB; Morgan.
‘‘CUPID AND THE VICAR OF SWALE’’ (1900). A short story, published in Punch, that would be reworked and expanded first into a novel, *The Bishop’s Apron (1906), and then into a play, *Loaves and Fishes (1911). When the Reverend †Robert Branscombe, a bachelor, succeeds to the living of Swale, the influential females (particularly †Lady Proudfoot) among his parishioners immediately concern themselves with his prospects for marriage. †Mrs. Edith Strong, a massive widow with an income of £1,500 per year, and †Jane Simpson, a homely spinster worth at least £100,000 in solid securities, appear as the principal contenders. However, Mrs. Strong presents a problem in that her income ceases if she should remarry. At any rate, Branscombe proposes to Mrs. Strong, but upon learning that she will lose her income, he suggests that they postpone the nuptials for at least five years. She adeptly releases him from the engagements, and he immediately becomes engaged to Jane Simpson. After reading either The Bishop’s Apron or Loaves and Fishes, one can see the ease with which *Maugham transformed Rev. Robert Branscombe into †Canon Theodore Spratte. Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories.
D ‘‘DAISY’’ (1899). Short story, published in *Orientations. It remains notable as the first piece of fiction wherein *Maugham depicted, as background and setting, the Kentish village of Whitestable, where he spent his youth. It becomes, as it will become in later pieces, the village of Blackstable. Initially one of two stories rejected by *T. Fisher Unwin in 1896 (the other being *‘‘A Bad Example’’), and thus Maugham would have to wait more than two years to see it in print. The piece concerns †Daisy Griffith, who runs away to London with †Captain Hogan, a cavalry officer and a married man, which causes her family to disown her. Then, following the usual pattern, Hogan rejects her, leaving her penniless. She begs her parents to take her back into their house, but they refuse, particularly her headstrong and socially conscious mother, †Mary Ann Griffith. Thus, Daisy must turn to the street. Later, in the midst of an acting career as a singer and dancer in a pantomime, Daisy is engaged to marry the sponsor of the show, the wealthy baronet †Sir Herbert Ously-Farrowham. Her hypocritical family, currently undergoing its own economic hard times, quickly reveals a renewed interest in her welfare. However, Daisy refuses to answer her mother’s letters or to admit her to her London apartment. In the end, Daisy, now married, returns to Blackstable for a brief visit with her family, but only to advise them that Sir Herbert will bestow an income upon her father, †Herbert Griffith, thus rescuing the family from poverty. She returns to London, realizing that never again can she be a part of her family or of Blackstable. Bibliography: Orientations; Seventeen Lost Stories; Curtis (1974).
DAVIS, [RUTH ELIZABETH] BETTE (1908–1989). American film actress, born in Lowell, Massachusetts. She earned Academy Awards for her roles in
DON FERNANDO; OR, VARIATIONS ON SOME SPANISH THEMES
35
Dangerous (1935) and Jezebel (1935). With Leslie Howard (1893–1943) as †Philip Carey, she starred in the 1934 film version of *Of Human Bondage, and her portrayal of †Mildred Rogers rescued what until that time had been a mediocre film career. Davis also played †Leslie Crosbie in the 1940 film version of *The Letter (opposite *Herbert Marshall as her husband, †Robert Crosbie). After she and *Maugham had lunched early in August 1941 in *Hollywood, the writer told his secretary/companion *Gerald Haxton that he found Davis very ugly. Bibliography: Crystal; Morgan.
‘‘DE AMICITIA’’ (1899). A short story published in *Orientations. †Valentia Stewart, an American painter, and †Ferdinand White, an English poet and playwright from Oxford, come together in Paris and spend the summer at a small village near Amsterdam, in a state of pure friendship. Both believe that they despise passion, preferring, instead, to worship Venus Urania and be all spirit and soul. In addressing her thoughts to the French artist and philosopher †Popper Rollo, Valentia reports that she considers Ferdinand as a companion, and he sees them both as the Edisons of a new communion. However, their situation becomes complicated when Love gets the better of Ferdinand. Valentia will not reciprocate; she insists that they must remain only friends. Ferdinand concludes that the passionate must forever be unhappy, while only the sexless and passionless creatures of the world (the blocks of ice) can find happiness. He leaves Valentia and goes to a nearby village. However, love (or, according to Popper Rollo, foolishness) eventually melts Valentia’s block of ice, and in the end, she kisses Ferdinand on the lips. Bibliography: Orientations; Seventeen Lost Stories.
DEAN, BASIL HERBERT (1888–1978). English actor, playwright, and director. He first appeared on the stage in 1906, then began his directing career five years later (1906) with the Liverpool Repertory Theatre. An active London theater manager and director between 1919 and 1926, Dean became a pioneer in stage lighting. In 1948, he organized the first British Repertory Theatre Festival. He directed *Maugham’s *East of Suez (1922) for 209 performances at His Majesty’s Theatre, then the dramatic version of *Rain (1925) at the Garrick Theatre for 150 performances. He held administrative posts with Reandean Productions and Basil Dean Productions; also, he served as founder, first chairman, and joint managing director of Associated Talking Pictures and its film studios, which eventually became Ealing Studios. Dean had an aversion to Maugham’s secretary/companion *Gerald Haxton. Bibliography: Freedley and Reeves; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchinson (1955b).
DON FERNANDO; OR, VARIATIONS ON SOME SPANISH THEMES (1935, 1950). A lengthy travel narrative published in New York and London by
36
‘‘THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY’’
Doubleday and focusing on historical and cultural events in sixteenth-century Spain but combined with fragments from a yet-unpublished novel set during the reign of Philip III, *Catalina [1948]. The volume proves hard to classify, for *Maugham has his various narrators (including himself and/or his persona) reflect, through narration and formal discourse, upon history, biography, and cultural influences. The piece could also be classified as travel literature. Of course, one cannot confront the Spanish Golden Age without discussion of the Catholic Church, an institution that held certain attractions for Maugham. Essentially, however, Maugham concerns himself with the likes of such eminent Spaniards as St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), St. Teresa (1512–1582), Lope Felix de Vega (1562–1635; Maugham had read two dozen of his 2,200 plays), Pedro Calderon (1600–1681), El Greco (1541–1614), Diego Velasquez (1599–1660), Fray Louis de Leon (1527–1591), Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), and Vicente de Espinal (1551–1624). He looks to art, drama, aesthetics, drama, mysticism, common life, manners, and picaresque fiction. Maugham revised the piece in 1950 as the result of critical commentary from *Desmond MacCarthy, Raymond Mortimer, and *Graham Greene. In January 1961, he gave the manuscript to *Lord Beaverbrook, who, in return, sent the writer some figs from his garden in Cap d’Ail. Maugham held the work together by a narrator—a traveler and a charming, witty, and intelligent guide. This scholar, Don Guillermo, discusses the historical, literary, and sociological histories of *Spain, as well as imparts his own philosophical reactions to the various subjects. He has been advised by a tavern owner and curio dealer in Seville, Don Fernando (and thus the title of the piece), to purchase a sixteenth-century Spanish text, which becomes the substance of the narrative. That substance goes forward in a lively manner, much as do the narratives and narrators of Maugham’s short stories. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Morgan.
‘‘THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY’’ (1931). A short story written in 1931 and published in the collection *Ah King (1933). The piece focuses on †Alban Torel, the young, highbrow District Officer at Daktar, the most isolated district in Sondurah in the *Federated Malay States. He enjoys playing Stravinsky, Ravel, and Darius Milbaud on the piano, while his equally highbrow wife, †Anne Torel, reads and hangs reproductions by *Marie Laurencin and *Gauguin. They both await the time when Alban will be appointed governor. Their sedate life is suddenly interrupted by an uprising of Chinese coolies on the rubber estate managed by †Prynne, the only Englishman within two days’ journey of the Torels’ residence. With only eight policemen at his disposal, Alban reasons coldly that he is badly outnumbered. He acts out of arrogant caution, rather than any form of cowardice. Instead of rushing to put down the riot, he chooses to wait two days for reinforcements. Anne begs him to go directly to the plantation; Alban tells her to mind her own business. On the third day,
DOUBLEDAY, NELSON
37
†Captain Stratton arrives with twenty Sikhs, and together with Alban’s police, they proceed to Prynne’s plantation. However, they discover that the riot has already been quelled by the Dutchman †Van Hasseldt, manager of a timber camp some twenty miles distant. In the end, †Governor Hannay dismisses Alban for his failure to act and for bringing ridicule upon the government. Upon the couple’s return to England, Anne walks out on her husband, leaving him totally destroyed. Cold reason and finely honed intelligence simply cannot function in an environment that requires immediate action. Bibliography: Ah King; Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Calder (1972/1973).
DORAN, GEORGE H. (1884–1956). Irish-Canadian publisher in New York and Toronto. Tall, courtly, bearded, and Methodist, he established his firm in 1907. In 1915, he published the American edition of *Of Human Bondage, with 5,000 copies at $1.50 each. Then, in 1921, the firm issued Maugham’s collection of South Sea stories, *The Trembling of a Leaf, 3,000 copies at $1.90 each; and in 1925, came *The Painted Veil, accompanied by a booklet of five essays entitled W. Somerset Maugham: Novelist, Essayist, Dramatist. Besides Maugham, his list of highly respectable, best-selling British authors included *Arnold Bennett, J. D. Beresford, Gilbert Cannan, *Compton MacKenzie, Oliver Onions, *Frank Swinnerton, and *Hugh Walpole. Although generally on friendly terms with Maugham, Doran reportedly termed the writer mean and jealous. In 1926, he merged his firm with Doubleday and Company, remaining with the new house in New York until 1929. However, because he could not get along with Frank Nelson Doubleday, he left to take up permanent residence in Canada. Bibliography: Morgan; Schorer.
DOUBLEDAY, ELLEN (fl. 1900–1950). A native of New Jersey and the wife of *Nelson Doubleday, she came from, and possessed, wealth. *Maugham, when he first met her at the *Mauresque in 1933 (shortly after her marriage), thought that she had a rather poor figure. According to *Jerome Zipkin, she ran the worst household in the world, particularly in terms of the cuisine that she served. She and her husband were close friends of both Maugham and his wife, *Syrie. Bibliography: Morgan.
DOUBLEDAY, NELSON (1889–1949). The son of Frank Nelson Doubleday (1862–1943), the founder (1897) of the publishing firm that bore his name. In 1926, Nelson negotiated the merger with *George H. Doran and took over the house of Doubleday, Doran, and Company in 1929. Thus, *Maugham automatically became a Doubleday author, and from then the firm published all of the American editions of his novels, principally *Cakes and Ale (1930), *The Narrow Corner (1932), *Theatre (1937), *Christmas Holiday (1939), *The Razor’s Edge (1944; a U.S. sale of 1,367,283 copies), and *Then and Now
38
‘‘THE DREAM’’
(1946)—the last a Literary Guild selection with an initial printing of 825,000 copies. Maugham also became a close friend of Nelson and Ellen Doubleday, the publisher being one of the few tall men whom the writer did not dislike. The Doubledays resided principally in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York, with a holiday vacation plantation in Yemasse, South Carolina, on the Combahee River, some fifty-five miles from Charleston. In 1940, Nelson built Maugham a house and a cottage on the South Carolina plantation, and the writer spent most of World War II there. In The Razor’s Edge, Nelson is one of the models for the character of †Gray Maturin. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
‘‘THE DREAM’’ (1924). A short story published in 1924 and included in the 1936 collection *Cosmopolitans. The †Narrator, a journalist and novelist on his way from New York to Petrograd in August 1917, dines at the station restaurant in Vladivostok. There he shares a table and converses with an ugly †Russian, a radical lawyer and widower. The latter talks of his departed †Wife of ten years—a native of *Switzerland, a talented teacher of several languages, and a jealous woman possessed of a bad temperament. One night she dreamed that her husband had attempted to kill her by throwing her over the balusters to the stone floor six stories below. She could not rid herself of that vision. At the same time, the Russian cannot remove from his own mind the notion of how easy it would be to do what his wife had dreamt. One night, one of the lodgers found the wife’s dead body on the stone floor, her neck broken. The Russian had spent the evening with a friend and did not return to the house until an hour later. The Narrator admits to having never been able to determine if the Russian had confessed to the murder of his wife, or if he had simply related a sardonic joke at his listener’s expense. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over.
DREISER, THEODORE HERMAN ALBERT (1871–1945). American journalist, novelist, and essayist, known for his depiction of, and attacks upon, the tragic state of life in America (particularly among the underclasses) as he viewed it within the first three decades of the twentieth century—see particularly Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhart (1911), An American Tragedy (1925). By 1915, he had become an authoritative critic among American intellectuals. Thus, his favorable 2,600–word review of Of Human Bondage for the New Republic (25 December 1915, 202–4) influenced other American reviewers, rescued the novel from almost total critical annihilation, and assured its permanent success, particularly in the United States: ‘‘Here is a novel or biography or autobiography or social conscript of the utmost importance. . . . To me . . . it is a gorgeous weave, as interesting and valuable at the beginning as at the end. . . . [it is] life
DREISER, THEODORE HERMAN ALBERT
39
itself, the great land and sea of people, England, Germany, France, battering, corroding, illuminating, a Goyaesque world.’’ *Maugham always stood ready to express his gratitude for Dreiser’s review. Bibliography: Cordell; Dreiser.
E EAGLES, JEANNE (1894–1929). American actress, real name Jeanne Aquila (Spanish ‘‘eagle’’). She starred as †Sadie Thompson in the Broadway opening (7 November 1922, Maxine Elliott Theatre) of Rain, a stage adaptation of *Maugham’s short story by John B. Colton and Clemence Randolph, perhaps her most significant achievement as an actress. In 1929, she played †Leslie Crosbie in the Paramount film version of Maugham’s *The Letter. Bibliography: Freedley and Reeves.
EARL, EDITH HONOR BETTY MAUGHAM. See MAUGHAM, HONOR. EAST AND WEST (1934). Collection of thirty stories, published in England the same year under the title Altogether and reprinted in 1953 as the first volume of The Complete Short Stories. Contains *‘‘Rain,’’ *‘‘The Fall of Edward Barnard,’’ *‘‘Mackintosh,’’ *‘‘Red,’’ *‘‘Honolulu,’’ *‘‘The Pool,’’ *‘‘The Letter,’’ *‘‘Before the Party,’’ *‘‘The Force of Circumstances,’’ *‘‘The Outstation,’’ *‘‘The Yellow Streak,’’ P. & O.,’’ *‘‘Jane,’’ *‘‘The Round Dozen,’’ *‘‘The Creative Impulse,’’ *‘‘Miss King,’’ *‘‘The Hairless Mexican,’’ *‘‘Giulia Lazzari,’’ *‘‘The Traitor,’’ *‘‘His Excellency,’’ *‘‘Mr. Harrington’s Washing,’’ *‘‘Footprints in the Jungle,’’ *‘‘The Human Element,’’ *‘‘Virtue,’’ *‘‘The Alien Corn,’’ *‘‘The Book-Bag,’’ *‘‘The Vessel of Wrath,’’ *‘‘The Door of Opportunity,’’ *‘‘The Back of Beyond,’’ and *‘‘Neil MacAdam.’’ EAST OF SUEZ. A PLAY IN SEVEN SCENES (1922). Performed at His Majesty’s Theatre, London, on 2 September 1922, and ran for 209 performances. In the same year, *William Heinemann published the piece in London, as did
EGYPT
41
*George Doran in New York. *Basil Dean directed the production, with Eugene Goossens, the youngest (1893–1962), writing the incidental music and Meggie Albanese and Basil Rathbone (1892–1967) in the lead roles. The onstage spectacles proved far more exciting than the plot or the dialogue, as Maugham created an opening scene of some forty Chinese coolies, water carriers, rickshaws, and Mongolian caravan attendants parading through and around the Peking Gate. Then, in the fourth act, almost immediately upon the attempted assassination of one of the principals, a host of excited and frightened Chinese monks and general persons of the streets rant and rave upon the stage. Goossens contributed to the attempts at authenticity by hiring an amateur orchestra comprising Chinese workers from Soho. Set in Peking, the play wrestles with the dilemma of †Daisy Anderson, a Eurasian and the daughter of a Chinese woman who has experienced a variety of relationships with a number of men. She becomes engaged to and then marries, †Henry Anderson, an employee of the British-American Tobacco Company at Peking. However, she remains in love with †George Conway, a civil servant and Henry’s friend. The triangle becomes quartet with the emergence of †Lee Tai Cheng, a wealthy Chinese merchant, who had purchased Daisy from her mother ten years earlier for $2,000. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, with tenures at Harvard and Oxford, Lee Tai Cheng has never abandoned his fondness for the poetry of Robert Burns. At the same time, he continues to lust after Daisy and thus orders his underlings to murder Henry Anderson. The thugs mistake George Conway for their intended victim and stab him. He recovers, plans to emigrate to Canada, but then shoots himself. Essentially, Maugham underscored his affluent audiences’ prejudices against marriage between the races. Anderson realizes his mistake in marrying Daisy, Conway shoots himself, and all reinforce what they already know: that marriage between a half-caste woman and an Englishman is doomed to failure. Bibliography: Collected Plays. III; Loss; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
EGYPT. Maugham visited Egypt (as well as Greece) during January–March 1906, his expenses covered by the sale of his successful play *Lady Frederick (1907) to *George Tyler. The writer spent most of his time in Port Said and Alexandria. He visited Egypt again in November–December 1929, principally in celebration of his having completed *Cakes and Ale (1930). Maugham’s final tour of the country came during January–February 1956, at the invitation of the Aga Khan. The writer and his secretary/companion *Alan Searle sailed from the *Mauresque to Genoa and Alexandria and then on to Cairo. At Aswan, they joined the Aga Khan, stayed at the Cataract Hotel, toured the Soudan and Luxor, and then returned to Cairo. Maugham set his play *Caesar’s Wife (1919) in Cairo, but, generally, he did not rely heavily upon Egypt for settings of his drama and fiction. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
42
ENCORE
ENCORE (1952). A film version of *Maugham’s stories *‘‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’’ (1924), *‘‘Winter Cruise’’ (1943, 1947), and *‘‘Gigolo and Gigolette’’ (1935), starring Roland Culver and Glynis Johns (b.1923) and produced in London by J. Arthur Rank. ‘‘THE END OF THE FLIGHT’’ (1926). A short story, published first in 1926, then issued in *Cosmopolitans (1936) and Here and There (1948). The †Narrator arrives at a remote little town on the north coast of *Borneo, where he lodges at the residence of the †District Officer until the arrival of the next boat. The host directs him to his room, but before they retire, the District Officer must tell his guest a ‘‘funny’’ story about a †Dutchman, the last person who had slept in the very bed assigned to the Narrator. At Sumatra, the Dutchman had committed an unnamed offense upon an †Achinese, who then swore to kill him. In fear, the Dutchman traveled to Batavia, Soerabaya, *Singapore, and Kuching, but the Achinese trailed him everywhere. On the morning following the night when the Dutchman had relayed his story, the District Officer and his †Boy discover their guest in bed, dead, with a Malayan double-edged knife (kris) lying across his throat. However, he has not a wound anywhere on his body. The Narrator is not amused by the District Officer’s humor. Bibliography: Cosmopolitans, Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Here and There.
‘‘THE EPISODE’’ (1947). A short story included in *Creatures of Circumstance (1947) and later in Here and There (1948). *Maugham based the piece on *Alan Searle’s experiences as a prison visitor at Wormwood Scrubs, Du Cane Road, London—designed by Sir Edmund Du Cane and built between 1874 and 1890. Originally intended for both men and women, it has, since 1902, housed only men. In Searle’s time, Wormwood Scrubs accommodated only first offenders; now the institution, the largest prison in Britain, serves as one of seven dispersal prisons for top-security prisoners and those condemned to life sentences. †Ned Preston (Maugham’s name for Alan Searle), a friend of the †Narrator, serves as volunteer prison visitor at Wormwood Scrubs, his principal duties being to help prisoners through the first difficult days of their new lives. Ned relates the story of †Fred Manson, an honest, well-intentioned Brixton mailman who goes to prison for stealing money from letters so that he can go out with a girlfriend from a family on a higher social level than he. The motive for his crime, †Grace Carter, a student at London University, is the daughter of †George Carter, a Brixton Road draper who had risen from the working class to own his own shop, with four assistants. When Carter and †Mrs. Carter (once a domestic servant) discover Grace’s relationship with Fred and Fred’s occupational situation, they initially feel humiliated because she is seeing someone from the working class. Eventually, the Carters give in to Grace’s wishes to marry Fred but rise up in indignation upon reading of Fred’s arrest for stealing the money.
THE EXPLORER
43
However, Grace determines to wait and to marry Fred upon his release from prison. She leaves home and school and takes a job in a department store. However, after eight months’ imprisonment and constant thinking about Grace, Fred becomes ‘‘sick to death of her.’’ There remains nothing more for Grace than to put her head in the gas oven. For Maugham, social snobbery has claimed two more victims. Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance; Here and There; Curtis (1976); Morgan; Weinreb and Hibbert.
ERVINE, ST. JOHN GREER (1883–1971). Irish dramatist and drama critic whose early plays were produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; he came to London and served as the drama critic for the Morning Post and the Observer and occasionally for the New York World. He received honorary degrees from the universities at St. Andrews and Belfast, wrote a volume of prose on the writing of drama (How to Write a Play), and became, in 1937, president of the League of British Dramatists. His plays include The First Mrs. Fraser (1929), Robert’s Wife (1937), and Private Enterprise. Although not an admirer of *Maugham’s novels, he enjoyed his plays; he wrote one of the few positive reviews of *The Circle (1921) and *East of Suez (1922). Ervine and Maugham corresponded regularly, and the former introduced Maugham at the Garrick Club, London (25 January 1954) on the occasion of the latter’s eightieth birthday. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Cordell; Freedley and Reeves; Hartnoll; Morgan.
‘‘THE ESCAPE’’ (1925, 1936). A short story, appearing first in 1926 and then in *Cosmopolitans. In this brief piece, the †Narrator introduces his friend †Roger Charing, the only man whom he has known able to extricate himself from a woman intent on marrying him. Roger, in a moment of weakness, fell in love with †Ruth Barlow, a two-time widow ‘‘hard as nails,’’ and the two planned to marry. However, Roger falls out of love with Ruth, regains his reasoning, and delays the marriage through a complex house-searching scheme that covers a two-year period. In the end, Roger wears down Ruth’s patience; she finds another man willing to marry and take care of her. The story ends with Roger’s note to Ruth, forwarding to her seven additional notices of houses for her and her latest betrothed to view. Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
THE EXPLORER (1908). A novel (expanded from a then-unproduced and unpublished play of the same title), written within the space of a single month and published in London by *William Heinemann in December 1907 and in 1909 in Boston by Baker and Taylor (reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1977; reprinted New York: Carroll and Graf, 1991). In his protagonist, the rugged Scotsman †Alexander Mackenzie, *Maugham grabs the baton of the white man’s
44
THE EXPLORER
burden from *Rudyard Kipling, sending Mackenzie off to expeditions in British East Africa in attempts to end the African slave trade and continue the building of the empire. The rugged, romantic, and patriotic Mackenzie takes his cue from Henry Morton Stanley [originally John Rowlands] (1841–1904), the Welsh-born explorer and journalist for the New York Herald who traveled to Abyssinia and Spain, found David Livingstone in Ujiji (1869), went to Zanzibar and Tanganyika (1871), led three expeditions to explore the Congo (1871–1879), founded the Orange Free State, traveled about the Soudan (1887–1889), and even found time to serve in Parliament (1895–1900). As usual, Maugham was able to take advantage of an attitude prevalent in Britain following the Boer War disaster; for emotional rehabilitation, people needed liberal doses of the prewar nostrums prescribed by the likes of Livingstone, Stanley, Kipling, and Generals Gordon and Kitchener. As with Byron’s speaker in Don Juan, they needed a hero. Even though Maugham himself admittedly detested his own novel, and even though critical commentators of the present moment quickly dismiss it as trivial, stereotypical, and excessively romantic, it cannot be too quickly cast into the dumpster of literary oblivion. After all, despite his dated and exaggerated poses, Mackenzie does possess a number of valid and even admirable qualities. Within him burns the fire of the restless, independent spirit, the individualist who cannot endure the relative closeness of the metropolis for too long. Readers of any age must admire his honesty and commitment to principles; he is a man who can keep his word and meet his obligations. Thus, even in the midst of traumatic moments in his unsteady relationship with the woman he loves, he can run off to his mine in Lancashire and lead the rescue attempts of miners trapped in a collapsed shaft. We cannot, today, embrace the totality of Alec Mackenzie, but we can find some solace and ample opportunities for escape beneath the shadows of what he represents. Alec Mackenzie loves †Lucy Allerton, principally because Maugham endowed her with qualities on a par with the great explorer. She remains the only pillar of the once noble but now collapsed house of Allerton. Her dishonest father, †Fred Allerton, has squandered his money and his name; after his release from prison, Lucy takes him home to die. Her younger brother, †George Allerton, raised by Lucy after the death of their mother, turns out no better than his father, and even Mackenzie, who takes him off to East Africa to make him a man, cannot effect change. Alec will not, under a commitment made to the brother, reveal the truth of George’s cowardice and contemptible behavior and thus can only endure beneath the false accusations of being responsible for his death. In the end, both Lucy and George agree to wait until the latter returns from yet another African expedition, and the romantic reader can only hope that they will arrange something before they become too old to enjoy it. As with the majority of Maugham’s drama and fiction, a number of secondlevel characters fill the gaps of interest left by the principals. From Maugham’s large reservoir of knowledge about London society emerge the likes of †Richard
THE EXPLORER. A MELODRAMA IN FOUR ACTS
45
Lomas and the American widow, †Julia Crowley. Both have keen wit and sharp tongues, and they spend considerable time, prior to their eventual marriage, in conversation and banter that take the reader back to the Restoration stage. Both cast rays of comic relief upon an otherwise excessively somber atmosphere. For example, when Lomas proposes marriage to her, Julia refuses, even though she has every intention of accepting. Then she turns about and proposes to him. For his part, Lomas, the barrister, parliamentarian, and excellent bridge player, suddenly retires from active life so that he will have time to pursue life’s more meaningful graces. Bibliography: Calder; Crystal; Curtis (1974); DNB; Howe.
THE EXPLORER. A MELODRAMA IN FOUR ACTS (1912). A play, written in 1899 and produced in London at the Lyric Theatre on 13 June 1908. Despite the presence of the matinee idol and the romantic actor/manager Lewis Waller [William Waller Lewis] (1860–1915) as †Alexander Mackenzie, it ran for only forty-eight performances. *William Heinemann published it in London in 1912, as did the Dramatic Publishing Company, Chicago, in 1912 and *George H. Doran in New York in 1920 (reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1977). The piece had initially been rejected by the actor/manager Sir Charles Wyndham (1837– 1919) in November 1903. *Maugham’s first and former theater agent, William Maurice Colles, sued the playwright in December 1909, demanding his commission for having sold The Explorer to Waller. Although the judge sided with Maugham’s claim that Colles had nothing to do with the transaction, the jury awarded Colles twenty-one pounds, ten shillings. Waller revived the play in May 1909, but it closed after only seven performances. Waller had rewritten (much to Maugham’s annoyance) the last act in light of the reaction by the critics; however, the play closed before that revision could go forth upon the stage. Although written before the novel and having been the germ from which Maugham cultivated the larger product, the play offers the same menu of romantic and heroic notions about the conditions under which one’s personal conduct and the state of the empire ought and ought not to exist. Thus, †George Allerton, following the arrest of his father, †Fred Allerton, goes off to Africa with Alec, turns a coward and takes to drink, shoots both the †Turkana woman and Alec (although the latter survives) and then is killed by the Turkanas. †Lucy Allerton, after the eventual realization that Alec’s honor remains intact, will continue to wait to marry the great explorer until he returns from yet another expedition to Africa. For his part, Alec Mackenzie continues to hold himself tall and straight upon the stage, enduring the problems brought about by young Allerton, the need to be true to his word, and his sincere love for Lucy. The major difference will be found with the witty bridge-playing barrister, †Richard Lomas; in the play, he accompanies Alec Mackenzie’s expedition to Africa,
46
THE EXPLORER. A MELODRAMA IN FOUR ACTS
suffering a slight arm wound in the process. But he quickly recovers, spends the summer in Scotland, Germany, and Italy, and becomes engaged to †Nellie Crowley (she having undergone a slight first-name change from play to novel). Bibliography: Curtis (1974); Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
F ‘‘THE FACTS OF LIFE’’ (1939). A short story included in the collection *The Mixture As Before (1940) and later (1949) made a part of the motion picture film *Quartet. †Henry Garnet relates an incident about his son, the young tennis player, eighteen-year old †Nicholas Garnet. Fortified with the Polonius-like precepts of his father, Nicky ventures to Monte Carlo, under the not too watchful eye of a †Colonel Brabazon. However, Nicky breaks the rules by gambling, lending money to a loose †Woman at the roulette table, and then entering upon a brief liaison with that same woman. Nonetheless, he outwits the woman’s attempt to get his money and ends the affair six thousand francs to the good, proving to the world that the naı¨vete´ of youth can indeed survive with, and even snatch a profit from, the corruption of a Continental European resort. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Mixture As Before; Pritchett.
‘‘FAITH’’ (1899). A short story from the collection *Orientations, published in London by T. *Fisher Unwin. †Brother Jasper, a Franciscan monk at the poor Spanish monastery of San Lucido, endures a whipping of thirty-eight strokes (one less than Christ had received) after confessing that he has lost his ability to believe in God. The healing of his wounds is interpreted not only as a miracle but as evidence of a renewed faith. However, the monk himself continues to have doubts. He leaves the monastery, but, overcome by the cold and snow, he freezes to death. A paralyzed woman touches Jasper’s cowl and believes she has been restored. People then come from far and wide to touch his tomb; ‘‘the wretched monk, who had not faith to cure the disease of his own mind, cured
48
‘‘THE FALL OF EDWARD BARNARD’’
the diseases of those who had faith in him.’’ Bits and pieces of this early story will return almost a half century later in *Maugham’s final novel, *Catalina (1948). Bibliography: Orientations; Seventeen Lost Stories.
‘‘THE FALL OF EDWARD BARNARD’’ (1921). A short story (intended initially as a play) in the collection The Trembling of a Leaf, published first by *George H. Doran. †Edward Barnard, a young man, abandons a successful Chicago business, as well as his fiance´e, to find happiness in *Tahiti. Sent to the island by his firm to introduce American methods to that part of the world, Barnard falls under the spell of the charm of the place, particularly its native women and a forger and ex-convict (brother of his fiance´e’s mother) from Chicago, †Arnold Jackson. After a year, he leaves the firm (Braunschmidt and Company). His fiance´e, †Isabel Longstaffe, consents to remain his friend, although she mistakenly believes that Edward has lost his courage. After two years, Barnard’s longtime friend †Bateman Hunter travels to Papeete and tries vainly to persuade him to return to Chicago, but the latter will have none of it. He will never exchange the truth, beauty, and goodness of Papeete, including Arnold Jackson’s Polynesian daughter, †Eva, for the hustle and constant striving of Chicago. For his part, Bateman Hunter returns to Chicago to marry Isabel and await the growth in size and importance of the Hunter Motor Traction and Automobile Company. In theme and in characterization, the story proves a taste of what will be developed more fully in The Razor’s Edge (1944). Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Trembling of a Leaf; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974).
FEDERATED MALAY STATES. The former Federated Malay States (FMS), situated at the southern portions of the Malay Peninsula, comprised the states of Pahang, Perak, Selangor, and Negri Sembilan, with the capital at Kuala Lumpur. From 1874 to 1895, they entered into treaties providing for their protection under the British government. Thus, British civil servants essentially governed a diverse population of Moslem Malays, Chinese, and Indians and assumed responsibility for developing rubber production of the area. Those same British civil servants and European rubber planters isolated themselves from the nonwhite peoples, as European life centered upon Government House and nonfunctional hunt clubs. European domestic life created a native servant structure of houseboys, water bearers, gardeners, drivers, maids, and waiters; white bureaucrats sought respite through drink, newspapers, bridge, brief visits to *Singapore, and an extended leave every five years. The states came under Japanese occupation 1941–1945, and then (1948) they joined the Federation of Malaya. Maugham paid only two visits to the FMS: the first (with his secretary/companion *Gerald Haxton) March to August 1921, and the second October 1925– January 1926. The writer almost immediately became attracted to the life of the
‘‘FLIRTATION’’
49
British colonials there, particularly the gossip and instances of immoral behavior. The most extreme examples of local scandals found their way into his short fiction, essentially those in the collections *The Casuarina Tree (1926) and *Ah King (1933). The very individuals who had talked and gossiped freely with Maugham and thus provided him with the materials for his stories (which he only barely disguised) believed that he had betrayed their trust and confidence in him. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Jonas (1959/1972); Morgan; Webster’s.
FLEMING, IAN LANCASTER (1908–1964). English journalist and writer of adventure and espionage fiction, best known for his James Bond novels, which achieved a high popularity (c.1955–1965) in print and on film. After formal education at Eton and Sandhurst, he studied languages at the universities in Munich and Geneva. He then worked for Reuters in Moscow (1929–1933), became a banker and stockbroker (1933–1939), served with British Naval Intelligence during the war, and eventually became associated (1945–1959) with the Sunday Times as its foreign manager. In 1952, he married *Maugham’s friend, Anne Rothermere, and thus, even prior to the publication of the James Bond novels, gained access to Maugham’s wide social circle at the *Mauresque. Maugham read the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), in a single sitting, enjoying it immensely. In 1953, Fleming asked *Alan Searle (through Maugham) for a letter of introduction to those who controlled the New York pornographic film industry, supposedly in preparation for the plot of his next novel. A year later, Fleming came to the Mauresque and gained Maugham’s permission to serialize the latter’s *Ten Novels and Their Authors (published in book form in 1954) for the London Sunday Times (Fleming wrote the ‘‘Atticus’’ column for that paper). Critical commentators generally agree that Maugham’s *†Ashenden stories influenced the spy/ intelligence agent novels of Fleming (as well as others who would later work in that form). Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990), (1972/1973); Crystal; Curtis (1977); Morgan.
FLEMING, MARIE LEWIS (fl. 1900–1920). Known as ‘‘Dillie,’’ this wealthy American, with auburn hair and wonderful coloring, had been unhappily married to Lord Kent. She met *Maugham (c.1910) at a London party, where he mistook her for the actress *Marie Tempest. Maugham corresponded with her regularly, until at least 1920, signing his letters to her with the rarely cited ‘‘Billie.’’ Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
‘‘FLIRTATION’’ (1906). A short story, written in 1904 and published in the London Daily Mail in 1906. †Bertie Shenton, a forty-year-old bachelor, proposes to †Mrs. Parnaby, an elegant and much sought-after widow of twentynine. He underscores his offer with the pronouncement that within the
50
‘‘FLOTSAM AND JETSAM’’
boundaries of their social world, marriage remains the only respectable means of livelihood for a nice girl. Her counterthesis revolves around the notion that if a woman really makes up her mind to marry a man, nothing on earth can save him. After a flirtatious game of proposals, refusals, and acceptances, they agree to marry. The story would be developed further and with much the same process and result in the relationship between †Richard Lomas and †Julia Crowley in the novel *The Explorer (1908). Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories; Curtis (1974).
‘‘FLOTSAM AND JETSAM’’ (1947). A short story published in *Creatures of Circumstance. Although technically a white man, †Norman Grange, an unsuccessful rubber planter, was born in Sarawak and raised in *Borneo, a condition that causes him problems. He feels isolated from his fellow whites, those born in Europe, causing him to become cross and disagreeable. His forty-sixyear-old wife, †Vesta Grange (she with a terribly strange tic that makes her shake her head), a former actress (Vesta Blaise) with a touring theatre group managed by one †Victor Palace, has not been back to England for sixteen years. Her only reason for living is that Norman wants her to die. Into their solitary and unhappy lives come the Oxford anthropologist †Skelton and his Chinese servant, †Kong, the former down with malaria. His short stay causes the stirring of memories and rumors. Two years after their marriage, Vesta fell in love with a neighboring planter, †Jack Carr. Norman shoots him but continues to live with her. He can find consolation in life only through reading James Boswell, Sir Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, and George Borrow. The piece ends with Vesta standing in front of a mirror, lipstick painted over her mouth and nose, laughing and shouting, ‘‘To hell with life!’’ Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance; Curtis (1974).
‘‘FOOTPRINTS IN THE JUNGLE’’ (1927). A short story published initially in 1927 and included in the 1933 collection *Ah King. *Maugham claimed no inventive credit for the story; he reportedly heard the account of the incident in a club during one of his visits to the *Federated Malay States. A plantation owner had taken a friend into his home, the friend had an affair with his wife, and the wife shot her husband. In Maugham’s fictional version, set in the European quarter of Tanah Merah and in Alor Lipis, the †Narrator, through his host and head of the police, †Major Gaze, meets the planter, †Theo Cartwright, his wife, †Mrs. Cartwright, and †Olive Bronson, Mrs. Cartwright’s nineteen- or twenty-year-old daughter, born four months after her marriage to Theo. Following a game of bridge, Gaze relates the story to the Narrator. Mrs. Cartwright had been married to †Reggie Bronson, a successful planter and longtime friend of Theo Cartwright. Some twenty years ago, Cartwright, also a planter but down on his luck, had written
FOR SERVICES RENDERED: A PLAY IN THREE ACTS
51
to Reggie asking for work; the latter invited him to stay at his house for a time. The time turns into more than a year. One night Reggie is found in the jungle with half of his head shot away, and Gaze suspected robbery. Then follow the birth of Olive, the employment of Cartwright by the company for which Bronson had worked, and, a year later, the marriage of Theo and Mrs. Bronson. Eventually, Gaze abandons his search for Reggie’s murderers. More than a year later, however, Gaze comes upon a †Chinese Man trying to pawn Reggie’s watch; he claimed to have found it in the jungle. Returning to the crime scene, Gaze, the Chinese Man, and several police also find the money Reggie had been carrying when he was shot, and Gaze theorizes that he had been murdered by someone whom he knew. He concludes further that the murderer had been Theo Cartwright, urged on by Mrs. Bronson; Cartwright was the father of Mrs. Bronson’s child, and the deed had come about when Reggie found his wife pregnant and knew that he could not have been the father. Nonetheless, Gaze has no hard evidence against the Cartwrights, and thus Reggie’s murder becomes a forgotten issue. Although confident in the correctness of his theory, Gaze does nothing; he reasons that his job is to prevent crime and to catch criminals when crime is committed. Most important, the Cartwrights are ‘‘the pleasantest people here.’’ After the passage of a sufficient number of years, the two realize that their crime will never be discovered; they cease to feel remorse and go on to lead comfortable lives. Bibliography: Ah King; Complete Stories. I. East and West; Cordell; Morgan.
FOR SERVICES RENDERED: A PLAY IN THREE ACTS (1932). Opened at the Globe Theatre, London, on 1 November 1932, for seventy-eight performances; starring Flora Mackenzie Robson (1902–1984), Cedric Webster Hardwick (1893–1964), C. V. France, and Ralph David Richardson (1902–1983). It was revived at the Old Vic Theatre, London, 29 April 1993, and even transformed to the television screen in 1959. Published in London in 1932 by *William Heinemann, and in New York by Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1933; reprinted, New York: Arno Press, 1977. In this shocking (for its time) and bitter antiwar play, considered one of *Maugham’s major contributions to the twentieth-century English theater, the writer, while he attacks undue romantic patriotism and the glorification of war, develops the effects of World War I upon a small group of persons in a rural town in Kent. In his view, those who remained behind suffered a grim tragedy much the same as those who fought in the trenches; they became neurotic or, in the case of †Eva Ardsley, mad. That tragedy, however, unlike the more noble Shakespearean forms, produces only bitterness and selfishness in Maugham’s characters. As usual, Maugham’s creative strength lies within those characters. †Leonard Ardsley, the sixty-five-year-old father and the only solicitor in Rambleston, has inherited the business from his father, maintains an office in his house, and
52
‘‘THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCES’’
remains almost oblivious to what goes on around him. †Charlotte Ardsley, his wife, has only a few months to live. Their only son, †Sydney Ardsley, has been left sightless from the war; embittered but trying terribly hard to maintain his dignity, he keeps mostly to himself and his chessboard. At age thirty-nine, the eldest daughter, Eva, mourns the death of her fiance´, †Ted, killed in the war, and looks after Sydney, while the youngest daughter, the twenty-six-year-old †Lois Ardsley, spends her time in an air of natural gaiety and immense healthiness, looking no more than twenty. †Ethel Bartlett, the Ardsleys’ second daughter and age thirty-five, has been married to †Howard Bartlett for some fifteen years; she does not wish to admit that her marriage has been a mistake, even though it has yielded an unspecified number of children away at boarding school. For his part, Howard, a small-tenant farmer and former army officer, drinks too much, believes that he is still an officer and gentleman, and lusts after Lois. Maugham thickens affairs with the presence of †Wilfred Cedar and his wife, †Gwen, both in their fifties, who have been married for twelve years, each for the second time. Gwen tries desperately to hold on to the remains of her youth, while the retired Wilfred has been able to preserve a good deal of his. He, as does Howard Bartlett, lusts after Lois Ardlsey, but he manages to succeed, and the two run off to London. Perhaps the most tragic character of all appears in the person of †Collie Stratton, a bachelor in his late thirties. After twenty years in the Royal Navy, during which he had risen to the rank of commander and had received (during the war) the DSO and the Legion of Honor, the economics of peacetime brought about his dismissal from the service. Stratton operates a garage, but again hard economics force him into financial difficulty. He owes money, and no one will lend it to him; he writes checks with nothing to cover them and faces prison. In the end, he shoots himself. Stratton’s suicide leads directly to Eva Ardsley’s breakdown, for at the height of her unhappiness and realizing she might very well spend the rest of her life looking after Sydney, she had propositioned Collie. She offers a cracked rendition of ‘‘God Save the King,’’ which proves an ironic commentary upon the isolation and complacency of her parents, the total superficiality of the Ardsleys’ provincial world, and the ‘‘benefits’’ of war and patriotic commitments bequeathed to the likes of Ted, Sydney Ardsley, Howard Bartlett, and Collie Stratton. Bibliography: Collected Plays. III.; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Dottin, (1937); Loss (1988); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b).
‘‘THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCES’’ (1924). A short story published initially in 1924 and then included in the 1926 collection *The Casuarina Tree. *Maugham weaves the piece upon the theme of a white woman’s attitude toward miscegenation. Essentially and simply, †Doris, a young woman, hears the confession from her husband of nine months, †Guy, that at age eighteen, from sheer loneliness, he had a purely physical and temporary arrangement with a then fifteen-year-old native Malay †Woman. The affair lasted ten years and resulted
FORSTER, E[DWARD] M[ORGAN]
53
in three half-caste children, two boys and a girl. Although the discovery has the potential of ruining what has been an ideal marriage, Doris concludes, on a perfectly reasonable level, that the affair belongs to his past and that he really and devotedly loves her. However, her instincts and her prejudices poison her reason; she imagines the Woman’s black arms around her husband’s neck and recalls that the half-caste children were born in the very bed in which she sleeps. She announces that for the next six months, she will no longer live with Guy as his wife. Following that period, Doris declares that she will leave for England and does so after she and her husband shake hands. Guy, lonely and in despair, allows the native Woman to return to his house on the very night of Doris’s departure. Interestingly, the reader catches only glimpses of the actual character of the native Woman, but her presence exists throughout as she preys on Doris’s mind. Perhaps more important, Maugham demonstrates how Guy’s affair with her, although temporarily thrust into the recesses of the past, has proven more durable than his marriage to Doris. Bibliography: The Casuarina Tree; Complete Stories. I. East and West; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Dottin (1928).
THE FORCE OF NATURE (1928). A play; unpublished and never produced. FORSTER, E[DWARD] M[ORGAN] (1879–1970). English novelist and critical essayist, the only child of the architect Edward Morgan (?–1880) and Alice ‘‘Lilly’’ Whichelo (1855–1945). He was educated at Tonbridge School and King’s College, Cambridge, after which he traveled to Italy and Greece. Later, he joined the staff of the Independent Review, wrote short stories, and in 1905, published his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread. In 1906, he and his mother settled at Weybridge, where he tutored the Indian Muslim patriot Syed Ross Masood and produced the novels The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard’s End (1910). Then followed more short stories, a journey to *India, the *homosexual novel Maurice (pub. 1971), employment at the National Gallery, a tenure (1915) in Alexandria with the Red Cross, and the publication of A Passage to India in 1924. Forster later lectured on literature and literary criticism at Cambridge and continued to write criticism and fiction while in residence at the university. Although close contemporaries in age and in sexual preference, *Maugham and Forster never really became friends. The former invited Maugham for tea at his house in West Hackhurst in November 1933, but that was about the extent of their socializing. Frankly, Maugham seriously disliked Forster, principally out of jealousy because the younger writers—*Christopher Isherwood, *Glenway Wescott, *Dorothy Parker—admired him for his depth and style but paid little attention to Maugham. In 1925, in two separate and distinct instances, *Hugh Walpole and *Virginia Woolf had occasion to list the eminent writers of British fiction; both included Forster and excluded Maugham. In 1944, the
54
THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW
magazine Time and Tide polled its readers for a British version of the Academie franc¸aise of eminent men of letters: the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan headed the list, followed by *George Bernard Shaw; Forster and H. G. Wells came next, followed by tie between Maugham and the poet John Masefield. The results did little to increase Maugham’s relations with Forster. Then, in May 1961, Maugham joined Trevelyan, Forster, Masefield, and *Winston Churchill in receiving from the Royal Society of Literature the award of Companion of Literature. Bibliography: Crystal; Drabble; DNB; Curtis (1977); Morgan.
THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW. An influential London journal that began publication in 1865, with George Henry Lewes (1817–1878), George Eliot’s companion, as its first editor. Dedicated to promoting liberal ideas, it changed from a fortnightly to a monthly periodical, merging with The Contemporary Review in 1955. Lewes required that all articles be signed, thus ending the tradition of anonymity in critical reviews. Upon its pages appeared the fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose of such writers as Anthony Trollope, Walter Bagehot, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Huxley, *Thomas Hardy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, *Henry James, *Rudyard Kipling, *H. G. Wells, *Hugh Walpole, V. S. Pritchett, and Ezra Pound. In 1902, under the editorship of W. L. Courtney a former Oxford don, its circulation stood at 5,000. *Maugham’s play *A Man of Honour (1903) appeared in a supplement to the March issue of that year, the first of the writer’s plays in print. Bibliography: Drabble; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
‘‘THE FORTUNATE PAINTER AND THE HONEST JEW’’ (1906). A short story published in the Bystander for 7 March 1906 but republished in Craig Showalter’s Seventeen Lost Stories as simply ‘‘The Fortunate Painter.’’ †Monsieur Leir, a Parisian Jewish art dealer comes to the studio of a young English painter, †Charles Bartle, living poorly and unhappily in Paris. There he sees a copy of a picture by Jean Andre Watteau (1684–1721), the French rococo painter. Charlie cannot marry his fiance´e, †Rosie (the first of Maugham’s several fictional Rosies), unless he can demonstrate to her father that he earns at least £250 per year. Leir declares that his son-in-law, †Rudolf Kuhn, in New York, can sell the piece and asks the young painter to affix his own signature to it. Then the dealer writes a letter to the †Chief Officer, U.S. Customs, in New York, that someone is attempting to smuggle into the country an original Watteau. The customs official erases the signature, and the publicity that ensues brings a California millionaire to Rudolf Kuhn, and he purchases the copy for $60,000. The dealer, in turn, gives Charlie Bartle his share of the profits, £5,000, and now the young painter will be able to marry Rosie. Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories; Morgan.
FRANCE
55
‘‘THE FOUR DUTCHMEN’’ (1928). A short story, written and initially published in 1928 and included as the final story in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). The piece focuses on four shipmates, together for five years and all friendly with one another, until a woman comes among them. The †Narrator relates the tale of the †Captain, the †Chief Officer, the †Chief Engineer, and the †Supercargo—four fat and look-alike Dutchmen, all of them avid bridge players, from the tramp steamer SS Utrecht, which sailed the Malay Archipelago. The Chief Engineer, awaiting retirement, will marry a †Widow awaiting him in a little town by the Zuyder Zee, while the Captain remains susceptible to the charms of the native girls. He wants to buy a house on the hills in Java and marry a pretty little Javanese. Months later, at the Van Dorth Hotel, *Singapore, the Narrator peruses a newspaper and sees that the Supercargo and Chief Engineer had been acquitted in a murder trial at Batavia. The †Hotel Manager tells him the story. The captain brought a †Malay Woman on board the Utrecht against the wishes of the other three Dutchmen, and the friendship among the four came to an abrupt end. The Captain found the girl in bed with the Chief Officer, shot the latter to death, and then killed himself. The Malay Woman disappeared, presumably murdered and then thrown overboard by the Engineer and the Supercargo. However, the evidence against them is too flimsy to convict them of anything. Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
FRANCE. France, particularly Paris, assumes significant roles in Maugham’s life and writing. His father, Robert Ormond Maugham, represented the legal affairs of the British Embassy in Paris, while his mother, Edith Mary Snell, born in *India, had been raised in the French capital. William Somerset Maugham entered the world at the British Embassy, on the Faubourg Saint Honore, Paris, on 25 January 1874. He spent the first ten years of his life in the worldly city, and thus French became the boy’s first language. The family occupied the third floor of a residence at 25 Avenue d’Antin (now Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt) and rented a summer house at the small but fashionable resort town of Deauville. The fourteen-year-old Maugham spent the winter of 1888–1889 at Hyeres, a resort near the Mediterranean, where he recuperated from pleurisy and studied with an English tutor. Following the death of his brother, Harry, in July 1904, Maugham went to Meudon, a suburb southwest of Paris on the river Seine, where his brother, Charles, maintained a summer house. There he met the artist *Gerald Kelly. In February 1905, with his companion, *Harry Philips, Maugham returned to Paris and occupied a flat at #3 Rue Victor-Considerant, near the Lion de Belfort. There he worked on *The Bishop’s Apron and *The Magician, formed a friendship with *Arnold Bennett, and strengthened his artistic and temperamental bonds with the French naturalists—Gustave Flaubert (1821– 1880), Joris Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), Edmonde (1822–1896) and Jules (1830–1870) de Goncourt, and Emile Zola (1840–1902). During World War I,
56
FRANCE AT WAR
he served (October 1914–February 1915) both in France and in Flanders as an interpreter and driver with a Red Cross ambulance unit attached to the French army. Within that period he met *Gerald Haxton, who would eventually become his secretary, companion, and longtime lover. Immediately prior to England’s entry into World War II, Maugham toured (November 1939 and June 1940) the Maginot Line, Nancy, and Toulon for the preparation of a book (*France at War, 1940) depicting the French war effort, sponsored by the Ministry of Information. He escaped in late June 1940, just after the fall of France. In December 1954, Maugham, with *Garson Kanin, *Ruth Gordon, and *Alan Searle, spent the Christmas season in Paris. [Maugham’s *Villa Mauresque, in St.-Jean Cap Ferrat, east of Nice on the French Riviera, is discussed under a separate entry.] The most extended descriptions of, and commentary upon, France, French life, and foreigners residing in Paris and in other parts of the country may be found in *The Magician (1908), *Of Human Bondage (1915), *The Moon and Sixpence (1919), *Christmas Holiday (1939), and *The Razor’s Edge (1944)— and to a lesser extent in *Mrs. Craddock (1902), *Theatre (1937), and a half dozen short stories and sketches. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1989/1990), (1972/1973); Dobrinsky (1976); Heywood (1966); Kanin; Menard (1968); Maugham (1978); Morgan.
FRANCE AT WAR (1940). A reportorial survey of wartime France, published in England (in March) by *Heinemann and in New York by Doubleday, Doran and Company; reprinted by Arno Press (New York, 1977). In this work of 111 pages, *Maugham attempted, after a six-week tour during the inactive opening months of the war, a detailed demonstration of the existence of goodwill and understanding between France and England. He sought also to call to the attention of the English people the facts about the need for a strong relationship between the two countries during this difficult, traumatic, and historical moment. Maugham had been asked to undertake the project, intended to elevate British wartime morale, by the British Ministry of Information. Most interesting about the piece is that Maugham retained the sharp mind’s eye that did him such service as a writer of fiction. Thus, he focuses hard upon the French national character, to include such items as the potential color of a woman’s hair if the war outlasts the dye, the rebirth of religion in the hearts of beleaguered Frenchmen, the spirit of the French as they prepare to offer their lives for the preservation of the nation, and the minute details of a visit to the Church of Our Lady of Victories. He visited the Maginot Line and the French soldiers entrenched there. Maugham interviewed the french minister for armaments and toured the headquarters at Nancy of the Fourteenth Division. He described its commander, General Jean Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny (1889–1952), carefully noting his elegant manners and well-cut uniform. He observed the workers in the armaments factories, as well as the battleships at the naval facilities at Toulon.
‘‘FRENCH JOE’’
57
However sharp might have been his eye, he looked only upon what the British and French governments wanted him to see. Therefore, not everyone viewed France at War as a book that should be read eagerly by Americans as well as Britons. At age sixty-six, Maugham still had to endure ample negative reaction to his work. ‘‘What possessed the author of ’Rain’ to offer the public this nauseating dose of concentrated saccharine?’’ asked Robert Dell (Saturday Review of Literature 22, no. [1 June 1940]). It reminds one of nothing so much as a goody-goody book written by a pious lady for Sunday school scholars and Mr. Maugham even affects the style of such publications. It is the worst kind of propaganda, for few people will believe that the French are the plaster saints that the author represents them as being and fewer still would like them the better for it if they were. It is a pity that Mr. Maugham has spoiled so good a case.
In June 1940, France fell, and the book ceased to be printed. Nevertheless, Maugham did manage to visit the places and take notes upon scenes and persons that would prove useful four years later in *The Razor’s Edge (1944). Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
FRENCH GUIANA. A French overseas department on the northeast coast of South America, French Guiana has two major divisions: the hinterland of St. Laurent-du Maroni and the coastal region of Cayenne. The French settled at Cayenne as early as 1604 and, throughout the eighteenth century, tried, without much success, to settle the area. Then the British occupied the region in 1809 but restored it to *France in 1817. The stern presence of the penal colony (opened c.1794, closed in 1947) did little to promote or advance the development of the region. *Maugham and *Gerald Haxton traveled to French Guiana by way of Haiti in December 1935, principally so that the writer could research portions of his forthcoming (1939) novel, *Christmas Holiday. They remained until January 1936, visiting the penal colony of St. Laurent du Maroni. There the writer studied carefully the executions by guillotine, performed by an executioner recruited from among the convicts and paid 100 francs per head for his efforts. Maugham and Haxton lodged in a bungalow owned by the governor of French Guiana, ate meals at a local hotel, and observed the prisoners (three-fourths of whom he estimated had committed murders). In addition to Christmas Holiday, Maugham transferred his experiences and observations into a number of stories—among them *‘‘An Official Position’’ (1937), *‘‘A Man with a Conscience’’ (1939), and to a lesser extent (and from his earlier reading, rather than firsthand visits) *‘‘French Joe’’ (1926, 1936) and *‘‘German Harry’’ (1924). Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan; Webster’s.
‘‘FRENCH JOE’’ (1926, 1936). A short story, written and initially published in 1926, then included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). The †Narrator,
58
‘‘A FRIEND IN NEED’’
having come to Thursday Island aboard a Japanese tramp steamer from Sydney, hears about the ninety-three-year-old, French-speaking Corsican †Joseph de Paoli (French Joe) from †Captain Bartlett, a pilot whom he meets at dinner. Because he, too, speaks French, the Narrator visits French Joe at the hospital that has taken him in. A relative of the Corsican General Pasquale Paoli (1725– 1807), French Joe had entered the French army in 1851, seventy-five years before the Narrator meets him. He was also a veteran of the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). Afterward, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on New Caldeonia for his communist activities in Paris, he escaped when the prison ship docked at Melbourne. Then he embarked on a series of adventures (from teaching French, to mining gold, to making himself king of a wild tribe of jungle cannibals) before finding himself in New Guinea. On Thursday Island, he developed a profitable fleet of pearling luggers, but a hurricane destroyed his boats, and he had to accept the charity of the hospital. He tells the Narrator that now he wants only to die, but not before his guest would grant him a package of cigarettes. Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
‘‘A FRIEND IN NEED’’ (1925, 1936). A short story, written and initially published in 1926, and included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). The †Narrator, who has been studying his fellow men for thirty years, reads in the newspaper about the death of one †Edward Hyde Burton, a merchant in business at Kobe, Japan, whom he had first met in Yokohama. Burton had a wife and two children and played a good and generous game of bridge. At a second meeting, Burton tells the Narrator about a namesake, †Lenny Burton, a first-rate bridge player and swimmer (he can do, and does, nothing else) who, upon having lost his money at cards, came to Edward Hyde Burton for a job. The latter refuses but tells his younger namesake that if he can swim the three miles from the Shioya Club to the creek of Tarumi, in Kobe, he will give him a job. Of course, drink and dissipation had ruined Lenny’s constitution; he makes the attempt that morning, and his body is found in the water three days later. When the Narrator asks Burton if he knew that Lenny would drown, Burton chuckles, ‘‘Well, I hadn’t got a vacancy in my office at the moment.’’ Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
FRERE, ALEXANDER STUART (1892–1984). Originally A. S. FrereReeves, Maugham’s literary executor (until 1962), a close friend of *Maugham, and editor at *William Heinemann, Limited, where he had been employed since 1923. In 1929, he had served, with C. S. Evans, as managing editor and had overseen the works of such writers as *Graham Greene, Thomas Wolfe, and *Sinclair Lewis (with whom he was also a close friend). In 1944, after Evans’ death from a flying bomb, he became chairman of the firm, remaining until
FROHMAN, CHARLES
59
December 1962. In their long association, Frere never edited a word of Maugham’s writing. Rather, he shipped the manuscripts straight to the printer, forwarded the printed proofs directly to Maugham, and then awaited their return (usually within ten days) from the latter. During World War II he worked for the Ministry of Labour. He and his wife, Pat, made frequent visits to *Villa Mauresque, and in 1959, he and Maugham engaged in a television interview in which the writer discussed his works. Maugham had his problems with Frere. First, the editor had, innocently enough, sent the galleys of *Cakes and Ale to *Hugh Walpole, who, as chairman of the selection committee of the newly founded Book Society, read it and recognized himself as †Alroy Kear. That ignited the flame of animosity between Maugham and Walpole that had been smoldering for years. Second, Maugham became angry at Frere for selling the American rights of *France at War (1940) and withholding 50 percent of Maugham’s royalty. Finally, in the summer of 1962, Frere refused to publish Maugham’s *‘‘Looking Back’’ (to be serialized in September and October in the Sunday Express), bemoaning the writer’s poor taste in attacking *Syrie Maugham when the poor woman was not alive to defend herself. He also advised Doubleday not to publish it, and the American firm complied. Bibliography: Morgan; Schorer.
FROHMAN, CHARLES (1860–1915). An American theater manager, the youngest and best known of the three theatrical impresarios—the others being Daniel (1851–1940) and Gustav (1855–1930), sons of a German-Jewish cigar maker. He began by selling souvenirs and programs at New York theaters, then graduated to walk-on parts and to the various aspects of the theater business. He visited England in 1880 as manager of Haverley’s Minstrels, then returned to America as a manager, theatrical and drama agent, and organizer of touring companies. After opening the Empire Theatre (1893), he leased the Duke of York’s Theatre, St. Martin’s Lane, London (1897), and held the lease for eighteen years. In 1904, he opened James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and thus made the playwright a millionaire. At one point, he had five London theaters under his direct control and has received credit for establishing the star system of the English and American stages. He perished, along with 1,195 other passengers, aboard the Lusitania when the Germans torpedoed that vessel on 7 May 1915. Although Frohman rejected *Maugham’s *Man of Honour in late 1902, he generally had a positive relationship with the playwright and novelist. He began in New York with *Lady Frederick in 1908; *Mrs. Dot (27 April 1908) proved Frohman’s first London production of a Maugham play. *Penelope (1909, 1912), originally entitled *‘‘Man and Wife,’’ had been commissioned by Frohman especially for the English actress Marie Tempest, but in 1911 the playwright reneged on his promise to the American impresario to write a new play
60
FULL CIRCLE
based on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. When Maugham first visited the United States in the fall of 1910, Frohman served as his host. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Curtis (1977); Freedley and Reeves; Hartnoll; Morgan.
FULL CIRCLE (1931). See under GIN AND BITTERS.
G GALSWORTHY, JOHN (1867–1933). English novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford, he initially studied for the law, but a meeting with Joseph Conrad and the discussion that followed directed his career to writing. His collection of short stories, From the Four Winds (1897), preceded his first novel, Jocelyn (1898), while the noted Forsyte family made its first appearance in a short story in the collection Man of Devon (1901). The novels of The Forsyte Saga appeared collectively in 1922 and continued from 1924 to 1929. He began his playwriting career with The Silver Box (1906) and continued through The Skin Game (1920) to 1924 with Old English, a total of thirty-one plays. A volume of poems and several additional Forsyte novels appeared posthumously. In 1932, Galsworthy received the Nobel Prize for literature, that presentation following the Order of Merit and several honorary academic degrees. From the outset, Galsworthy represented the voice of morality and humanitarianism, documenting the affluent middle class that ruled England prior to World War I. Although contemporaries and practitioners of the same trades, Galsworthy and *Maugham were neither close to each other nor particularly unfriendly. Each, however, knew of the other’s existence. During the height of his reputation for fiction and drama, Maugham could never quite reach the pedestals upon which the likes of Galsworthy, *George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, and *H. G. Wells had been critically and popularly placed. Nonetheless, one can easily uncover critical commentary that attempts certain comparisons between the two. For his part, Maugham considered Galsworthy a writer of messages and a social realist, a novelist and playwright who set out to reform the world. As for himself, following the publication of *Liza of Lambeth (1897), Maugham
62
GARNETT, EDWARD
continued to maintain that he functioned clearly and principally as a teller of stories. Bibliography: Cordell; Crystal; Curtis (1977); DNB; Drabble; Morgan; Muller.
GARNETT, EDWARD (1868–1936). Minor novelist, literary critic, and playwright, best known as an editor and publisher’s reader. The son of Richard Garnett the younger (1835–1906), superintendent of the Reading Room at the British Museum, Edward Garnett worked for several publishers, including *Thomas Fisher Unwin and Jonathan Cape. His name has been linked to the manuscripts of such writers as Joseph Conrad, *D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Miller Richardson, *E. M. Forster, and W. H. Hudson. His wife, Constance Garnett (1862–1946), the noted translator of Russian fiction, studied Russian while awaiting the birth of their son, who would become the Bloomsbury novelist and critic David Garnett (1892–1981). Garnett played important roles in *Maugham’s early literary career. On 20 July 1896, Garnett, on behalf of *T. Fisher Unwin, rejected Maugham’s short story *‘‘A Bad Example,’’ informing the publisher (but not the author and then medical student of St. Thomas’ Hospital, London): ‘‘There is some ability in this, but not very much. Mr. Maugham has imagination and he can write prettily, but his satire against society is not deep enough to command attention. He should be advised to try the humbler magazines for a time, and if he tries anything more important to send it to us.’’ In mid-January 1897, Unwin handed the manuscript of *Liza of Lambeth to Garnett for a second opinion, since another of his readers, Vaughan Nash, had turned it down. Garnett, on 25 January, termed the novel ‘‘a very realistic study of factory girls and cosher [Cockney] life. . . . The study is a dismal one in its ending, but the temper and the tone of the book are wholesome and by no means morbid.’’ Further, Garnett believed that it would appeal to the same persons who read Arthur Morrison (1863–1945), the writer of hard, realistic short stories about the East End of London. ‘‘If,’’ Garnett continued, ‘‘Fisher Unwin does not publish A Lambeth Idyll [Maugham’s original title] somebody else certainly will. . . . We should say Publish—but. . . . Mr. Maugham has insight and humour and will probably be heard of again.’’ At the end of 1897, before journeying to *Spain, Maugham submitted another novel to Unwin, *The Making of a Saint. Again, Garnett responded favorably, reacting to the piece as ‘‘very strong, fresh and good . . . and [that it] continues Maugham’s reputation as a clever writer.’’ However, more than a year later, on 18 January 1899, Garnett rejected, once more on behalf of Unwin, Maugham’s collection of stories *Orientations, which included the same ‘‘A Bad Example.’’ He thought the pieces ‘‘a little flat, a little heavy . . . [and] we feel that Maugham’s reputation will suffer if he publishes the present collection.’’ However, Unwin ignored his reader’s report and published the volume. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Curtis (1977); DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
GAUGUIN, EUGENE HENRI PAUL
63
GARRICK CLUB. Founded on 17 August 1831, with the duke of Sussex as its patron and originally located in the Probatt’s Family Hotel at 35 King Street, London, the Garrick Club (named for the actor/manager David Garrick [1717– 1779]) became a place where actors could meet on the same level with men of education and refinement. Its membership has been restricted to seven hundred persons. Known for its collection of portraits of actors and actresses, as well as memorabilia from the theater, it numbered among its more noteworthy original members the Frenchman Count Alfred Guillaume Gabriel D’Orsay (1801–1852), the banker/poet Samuel Rogers (1763–1865), the actor William Charles Macready (1793–1873), the actor Charles James Matthews (1803–1878), and the publisher John Murray the younger (1778–1843). Among the later members may be mentioned Charles Dickens (1812–1870), novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863, Anthony Trollope (1815–1882), William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911), the Pre-Raphaelite painter and book illustrator John Everett Millais (1829–1896), the classical artist Frederic Leighton (1830–1896), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), the actor Henry Irving (1838–1905), the actor/ manager *Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917), and the actor/manager Johnston Forbes-Robertson (1853–1937). Of particular interest is the revelation that Maugham’s father, Robert Orman Maugham, proposed Thackeray’s name for membership in the Garrick Club. Since 4 July 1864, it has been located at 15 Garrick Street. In December 1908, the actor Arthur Bourchier (1863–1927) nominated *Maugham for membership in the Garrick Club, and his election came in January 1909, one indication that the thirty-four-year-old playwright and novelist had ‘‘arrived.’’ It became one of his regular sites for playing bridge. On 25 January 1954, the occasion of Maugham’s eightieth birthday, the Garrick Club gave a birthday dinner for him; only Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope had received such honor. Following the dinner, he went upstairs and played bridge until one o’clock in the morning. Bibliography: Cordell; Drabble; Hartnoll; Morgan; Weinreb and Hibbert.
GAUGUIN, EUGENE HENRI PAUL (1848–1903). The French postimpressionist painter, son of a journalist and a half-Peruvian Creole mother. He went to sea at age seventeen but then settled in Paris (1871), married a Danish girl who bore him five children, and became a successful stockbroker on the Bourse. However, he maintained an interest in painting and in collecting the works of impressionist painters. From 1876 to 1883, with help from the West Indian-born impressionist Camille Pissaro (1830–1903), Gauguin had exhibited his own works, which eventually led him to leave his family and situation. During 1887– 1888, he made his way to Martinique, then to Pont Aven, Brittany, where he became the leader of a group of painters (1888–1890). Then followed a quarrel with Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) at Arles and association with the symbolists’ circle in Paris. Eventually, Gauguin developed his own style, ‘‘synthes-
64
THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR
ism’’ (synthetisme), which paralleled his deep dislike of civilization and identification with the emotional directness of primitive peoples. He spent 1891– 1893 and 1895–1901 on *Tahiti, where in 1898 he tried to kill himself with arsenic, and 1901–1903 at Dominiha, Marquesas Islands, where he lived on breadfruit and water. From those islands grew his development of tapestry-like canvases painted in purples, greens, dark reds, and browns of the native subjects there. He died from syphilis. In addition to his wife and five children in France, Gauguin left one other, a son named Emil Tail, who remained on Tahiti as an illiterate laborer and gardener. He had resulted from his father’s union with a native wife, Tehura. *Maugham first became interested in Gauguin in Paris in 1905, when the Irish painter *Roderick O’Conor (who would serve as the model for †Clutton in *Of Human Bondage) discussed with him the life and career of the French artist. The sullen and ill-tempered O’Conor, who took an immediate dislike to Maugham, had known Gauguin from Pont Aven in 1894 and owned several of his signed paintings. Maugham became a frequent uninvited visitor to O’Conor’s studio, asking countless questions to which the temperamental artist did not always willingly respond. Nonetheless, the idea that would manifest itself in the person of †Charles Strickland in the 1919 *The Moon and Sixpence had already been planted by O’Conor. Interestingly, Maugham’s mythical re-creation of Gauguin initially appeared, indirectly, as early as 1915, in Of Human Bondage, when Clutton outlines for †Philip Carey the briefest details of Gauguin’s life and his impressions of his work. Philip then perceives the artist’s life and the artistic temperament as true forms of human bondage. In reality, Clutton’s sketch stands as the plot summary for The Moon and Sixpence. Maugham then spent four to six weeks on Tahiti, beginning February 1917, researching Gauguin’s life there, sending his companion, *Gerald Haxton, into the bars of Papeete to speak with those Europeans who had known Gauguin. His sharp eyes captured those natives and European ne’er-do-wells who would become part of his nonbiographical version of the struggles undergone by the French painter. He even managed to purchase, for a mere two hundred francs, a glass door panel painted by Gauguin. Housed in the *Villa Mauresque, it escaped the damage from Italian and German troops during World War II and, in 1962, sold at Sotheby’s for $37,400. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973), (1989/1990); Cordell; Crystal; Curtis (1974/1977); Gauguin; Menard (1968); Morgan.
THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR: A RECORD OF A JOURNEY FROM RANGOON TO HAIPHONG (1930). An account of *Maugham’s travels in 1923 through Burma, Siam, and Indochina, published February 1930 in New York by Doubleday, Doran, and Company and in London by *William Heinemann; reprinted 1989 by Paragon Books. Maugham borrowed the sense and tone of the piece from a short essay, ‘‘On Going on a Journey,’’ by William
‘‘GERMAN HARRY’’
65
Hazlitt (1778–1830), whose works he had only recently discovered. In Hazlitt’s essay the writer traverses the English countryside in complete leisure, freedom, and anonymity. Thus, the volume exists as little more than a series of random impressions, loosely connected by the area in which Maugham traveled and through a narrator who functions as Maugham’s persona. As the title indicates, the writer records, in leisurely fashion, his equally leisurely journey from Rangoon northward to Mandalay, in upper Burma, and then on to Haiphong. Once he finishes with the opening discourse on a comparison/ contrast between Charles Lamb (1775–1834) and Hazlitt and the need to achieve emotional and physical liberty, he takes the reader on strolls through the Irrawaddy Shwe Dagon, Keng Tung, Saigon, Hanoi, Hue, and *Hong Kong, traveling by canoe, riverboat, rickshaw, and pony, accompanied by a corps of attendants on donkeys. The natives cordially received him, which gave him the opportunity to observe (for future use in his fiction) the intimate details of their lives and customs. As usual, Maugham kept a sharp eye out for English colonists and European settlers, particularly the circumstances that held them to the East and to the rumors and tales that they shared with him. Again, as usual, Maugham proved more interested in people than in monotonous, repetitive scenery, preferring to chat with muleteers, priests, sea captains, Burmese servants, and boatmen—as well as discuss the philosophy of Buddha—rather than simply describe the physical appearance of places. He noted conversations about love, food, marriage, the opium trade, and suckling pigs. He reacted with a combination of fear and discomfort to water buffaloes, cockroaches, and obnoxious fellow travelers. Nonetheless, he does provide sensitive impressions of the pagodas at Pagan, the temples of Angkor, and the palace at Mandalay. In this, reportedly the favorite of all of his books, Maugham even has the time to introduce a fictional character, †Blenkinsop, a name that he resurrected from his 1912 play, *Mrs. Dot. This insignificant writer has produced a totally unreadable book, but one praised by contemporary London critics (*Virginia Woolf, *Osbert Sitwell, *Arnold Bennett, and *Hugh Walpole). His readers will see Blenkinsop and his admirers in greater detail several months later with the publication of *Cakes and Ale. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990), (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Morgan.
‘‘GERMAN HARRY’’ (1924, 1936). A short story (more accurately a character sketch) published initially in 1924 and included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). The †Narrator hires a pearling lugger to take him from Thursday Island (in the Torres Strait, north of Queensland, Australia) to New Guinea. On his way, he stops at the island of Trebucket to leave flour, rice, and magazines for its only resident, a Danish hermit named †German Harry. Harry, a man past seventy years of age, has been on the island for the past thirty years, the result of a shipwreck. He and sixteen others survived and landed on Trebucket; at the end of three years, only five remained. He has refused all offers
66
GERMANY
to be taken off. Apparently, during those first three years of their stay there, Harry ‘‘had seen such terrible things that he had a horror of his fellow-men and wished never to live with them again.’’ In the interim, according to hearsay, he had managed to hide a magnificent collection of pearls, the location of which remains a mystery. The Narrator sees Harry as ‘‘nothing but a narrow, ignorant, and cantankerous sea-faring man’’ who will carry his secrets to the grave. Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
GERMANY. In the spring of 1890, after having spent the winter at Hyeres, on the French Riviera, with an English tutor and having left King’s School for good, the sixteen-year-old *Maugham went off to Heidelberg. His German-born aunt, Sophie Maugham, still had relatives in Munich, and she made arrangements through them that the boy live in Heidelberg with the Grabau family, a professor and his wife who took in boarders. Here, among the other characters so graphically described in *Of Human Bondage, Maugham met first a Harvard professor of Greek and then the *homosexual esthete *John Ellington Brooks, who, among other experiences, taught him about art and literature. He also studied German and attended lectures at the University of Heidelberg by Ernst Kuno Berthold Fischer (1824–1907), professor of philosophy there, on the philosophical creed of *Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). He also attended performances of avant-garde plays by *Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), Henri Franc¸ois Becque (1837–1899), Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), and Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928), interesting exposures to drama for an impressionable young man who had never before seen a play. On one occasion during a visit to Sophie’s relatives at Munich, he actually caught sight of Ibsen at the Maximilianerhof, drinking beer and reading his newspaper. By the spring of 1892, Maugham had come back to England, determined to be a writer. Maugham returned to Germany and Austria in late July 1937, visiting Salzburg, Munich, and Badgastein, paying particular attention to the state of the art galleries under Nazi auspices. By March 1938, the writer had become seriously concerned about the state of affairs in Germany, principally because of his substantial investments in German marks, which, because of currency restrictions, could not be taken from the country. He proposed a trip to Germany to buy art with those funds but thought better of it as the political situation deteriorated. The opportunity to return did not present itself until May 1957, when the eightythree-year-old writer, following a painful bout with inflammation of the kidney, set out with his secretary/companion *Alan Searle on a tour of *Italy and Germany, where he took the waters and prepared for an essay on Goethe’s novels. During most of April 1959, he spent time in Munich as part of a tour that included London, Badgastein, Vienna, and Venice, repeating the itinerary a year later (May 1960) following his return from Japan. Finally, at the end of May 1961, in his eighty-seventh year, Maugham returned to Heidelberg and, on the occasion of the 575th anniversary of the uni-
‘‘GIGOLO AND GIGOLETTE’’
67
versity, became the first foreigner to receive the title of Honorary Senator of Heidelberg. The Senate also conferred a diploma on him, he had his photograph taken while kicking off the opening ball at a university soccer match, and the students held a beer-drinking exercise in his honor. Bibliography: Burt; Calder (1989/1990); Cordell; Dobrinsky (1955); Morgan; Raphael (1976).
‘‘GIGOLO AND GIGOLETTE’’ (1935). A short story, written in 1935 and included in the collections *The Mixture As Before (1940) and Here and There (1948). It was also a part of the 1952 film *Encore. The idea for the piece came from *Maugham’s having seen, in Monte Carlo in 1931, a woman dive 100 feet into 8 feet of water, a feat that she performed twice each day and thought nothing of it. He developed that experience into the theme about the tyranny of fashion and of public taste upon those who have determined to base their lives upon entertainment. One rather interesting interpretation of the story has Maugham weaving a combination of description of the realities of life on the Riviera on the eve of World War II and the risks of the entertainer into the plight of the professional writer: each submission to an agent and/or publisher becomes a kind of ‘‘dive of death’’; the spectators can hardly contain themselves as they strain their necks to see if the diver/writer will hit or miss the mark. Specifically, the story concerns †Stella Cotman, who, at a casino on the Riviera, dives from the top of a sixty-foot ladder into a tank filled with five feet of flaming water. Her act, added to the dinners and suppers, serves only to induce people to lose their money at the gaming tables, and the twenty-six-year-old Australian brings more customers than anyone into the casino. An assortment of trendy characters hovers in the background: †Syd Cotman, a Cockney former gigolo, now Stella’s husband and manager; †Paco Espinel, the young but penniless Argentine booking agent for the casino; †Eva Barrett, a wealthy American widow; †Sandy Westcott, a nightly visitor to the casino who knows everyone there and through whose eyes everything that occurs there is filtered; and a host of assorted Europeans of title whose principal vocations appear to be idleness and spending money. Westcott accurately speaks for all of them when, at the end of Stella’s dive, he sighs and wonders if ‘‘he was disappointed or relieved.’’ Maugham adds an interesting and totally different couple to his cast of characters. †Carlo Penezzi, an old Italian pension owner and former circus ringmaster, and his English wife, †Flora Penezzi, an equally old and onetime acrobat (a human cannonball), have been retired since the year of Victoria’s death (1901). They bring with them both the sense of ‘‘professionalism’’ associated with the business of entertainment and the underlying suggestions of a long and pleasant life in retirement. Not anyone among the idle and wealthy spectators has ever heard of the Penezzis, but they strike a sharp note within Stella Cotman. She realizes that after she finishes her career, no one will ever remember her or what she had
68
GIN AND BITTERS
done. Stella suddenly becomes afraid and informs Syd that she can no longer do two dives each night, that she has lost her nerve. Though he loves Stella, Syd expresses the fear that they will both have to abandon their current state of popularity and affluence and return to their former pathetic lives as marathon dancers. That is enough to hurl Stella through her wall of fear and get herself ready for her next dive. She smiles coldly in the mirror: ‘‘ ‘I mustn’t disappoint my public,’ she sniggered.’’ Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Here and There; The Mixture As Before; Curtis (1974); Morgan.
GIN AND BITTERS (1931). A sharp and sometimes vicious parody, not so much of *Cakes and Ale (1930) but of *Maugham himself. It was published in New York by Farrar and Rinehart and written under the name ‘‘A. Riposte.’’ In actuality, the piece came from the pen of Elinor Mordaunt, a pseudonym for Evelyn May Clowes Wiehe, a writer of travel books, contributor to the popular magazines for women, and a friend of *Thomas Hardy’s second wife, Florence Dugdale Hardy. In England, Martin Secker, Ltd., published her book in September 1931 under the title Full Circle. That October, Maugham sued Mordaunt for libel, but Secker withdrew the English edition from the stalls before the case could get to court. Interestingly, shortly after all of the critical and legal smoke had cleared, Elinor Mordaunt could be numbered among the 150 writers and publishers at a dinner on 25 November 1931 at the Commodore Hotel, New York, sponsored by the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (*PEN) to honor *Sinclair Lewis’s having received the Nobel Prize in literature. Mordaunt gave Maugham the name ‘‘Leverson Hurle,’’ a small, dark, and sallow man, a decadent and aging writer who ‘‘secreted ‘‘bile as snakes secrete poison in their fangs: the bile of sheer venom.’’ The name of ‘‘Leverson’’ may well have come from Ada Leverson (1862–1933), the author of the novel The Limit (1911), in which Maugham appeared as ‘‘Gilbert Hereford Vaughan’’ (or ‘‘Gillie’’). At any rate, accompanied by his secretary, Hurle journeys to the Malay Peninsula and returns to England to write short stories about what he had seen and heard. Later, he attacks his fellow writers, both the living and the dead, but particularly *Hugh Walpole, whom Mordaunt christens ‘‘Polehue,’’ a ‘‘living writer . . . a man of about his [Hurle’s] own age, or maybe a little younger . . . a writer whose books, in general, ended as weakly as his own began, apart from one single effort.’’ Additional parodies include Hurle’s affair with a Cockney named ‘‘Lizzie’’ (*Liza of Lambeth); his marriage to a divorce´e named ‘‘Cynthia Stoddard’’ (*Syrie Welcome); and journeys to Paris, Marseilles, and *Tahiti to gather material for novels. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Morgan; Schorer.
GISSING, GEORGE ROBERT (1857–1903). English Yorkshire naturalistic novelist born at Wakefield. He acquired his education at a Quaker boarding
GISSING, GEORGE ROBERT
69
school in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, then at Owen’s College, Manchester, from which he was expelled when caught stealing money from a cloakroom to give to a prostitute. For that exercise, he received a one-month prison term. In 1876, he went to America to roam about, then returned to London the next year and tutored Latin and Greek. Twice married, unhappily, to proletarian girls—the first one a prostitute, with whom he lived unhappily in the London slums—his only friend seems to have been the novelist and essayist *H. G. Wells. Little wonder, then, that the largest portion of his fiction focuses upon poverty, misery, and failure. His fictional re-creations of slum life came forth as one large trap from which few could ever escape. Gissing published his first of more than twenty novels, Workers in the Dawn, in 1880; his last one, Brownie, appeared posthumously in 1931. His best-known works of fiction include New Grub Street (1891), a bitter study of corruption in the literary world; Born in Exile (1892); and The Odd Women (1893). Thus, by the time Maugham first thought of depicting life in East End London, Gissing’s proficiency in that fictional mold had already been fairly established with The Nether World (1889), in which the latter expressed his disgust with workingclass life and depicted the miserable conditions in the slums. Further, heavily influenced by Emile Zola (1840–1902) and the French naturalists, Gissing had dismissed the notion that residents of the slums could be endowed with virtue and nobility. Little doubt, then, that with the publication of *Liza of Lambeth (1897), *Maugham had attached himself to at least some portions of Gissing’s new realism coattails. Funerals among the poor, fights between women, and the slum dwellers’ various amusements appear in both Maugham’s piece and Gissing’s The Nether World. The major difference between the two, of course, centers upon the writers’ different levels of emotion: Gissing wrote out of anger; Maugham, being a student of medicine and an observer of life, researched and analyzed his subject. However, Liza of Lambeth proves not to have been the extent of Gissing’s influence upon Maugham. As part of his own unhappiness, Gissing injected into his fiction ample representation of the destructive woman. Thus, critical commentators have drawn comparison between Maugham’s †Mildred Rogers in *Of Human Bondage (1915) and Carrie Mitchell in Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn (1880). Both have been drawn as uneducated and essentially useless; both represent mental and moral superficiality; both fade in and out of men’s lives, exercising betrayal and causing traumatic separation and reunion; both degenerate gradually from suspect respectability to prostitution. However, from a totally opposite pole, one must draw some degree of comparison between Gissing’s Rhoda Barfoot (The Odd Woman, 1893), who survives quite well after her husband abandons her, by operating a typing bureau, and Maugham’s †Amy Strickland (*The Moon and Sixpence, 1919), who pursues the same vocation after her husband, †Charles Strickland, runs away to paint. Finally, in a change of gender, one can see the clear parallels of literary pros-
70
‘‘GIULIA LAZZARI’’
titution in Gissing’s Jasper Milvain (New Grub Street, 1891) and Maugham’s †Alroy Kear (*Cakes and Ale, 1930). In the summer of 1901, while on the northern coast of Kent, Maugham wrote one of his rare book reviews (he never thought they paid enough), this one of Gissing’s travel work and his impressions of Italy, By the Ionian Sea (1900), which appeared in the Sunday Sun for 11 August 1901. The result proved favorable, since Maugham had attractions to both Italy and Gissing. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Crystal; Curtis (1974/1977); DNB; Drabble; Morgan; Webster.
‘‘GIULIA LAZZARI’’ (1928). A short story from *Ashenden: Or The British Agent. In Geneva, †William Ashenden finds himself bored, finding, at present, his existence as an agent in charge of a coterie of spies as orderly and monotonous as that of a city clerk. He then considers a minor flirtation with †Baroness von Higgins, an Austrian spy, which causes a sharp written reprimand from his chief, †Colonel R. At some time thereafter, R. orders Ashenden to Paris for a meeting to discuss †Chandra Lal, a dangerous agitator, bitterly hostile to British rule in *India. Although recognizing Lal as a fanatic and conspirator, Ashenden also senses something rather attractive and romantic about the man. Heretofore having nothing to do with women, Chandra Lal has, quite suddenly, fallen in love with †Giulia Lazzari, an incompetent Italian dancer of easy virtue who does Spanish dances and calls herself La Malaguena. Also an equally incompetent spy, first for the Germans and then working for Chandra Lal, Giulia is arrested in England and faces a ten-year prison sentence. R. promises that if she can induce Chandra to leave Berlin for Lausanne, *Switzerland, and then come over to her in Thonon, *France, where the British agents can capture or shoot him, she will be free to return to Spain or leave for South America. R. assigns Ashenden to make certain that Giulia, in the company of two †Detectives, gets from Paris to Thonon. Once there, she engages in several vain efforts to escape while following Ashenden’s instructions and writing letters to Chandra Lal to come to Thonon. Finally, Chandra Lal arrives in Thonon, but when Ashenden and †Felix, an agent, enter the waiting room at the pier, they find him dead; he had become suspicious and swallowed poison rather than be taken prisoner. Giulia confesses to Ashenden that he always carried a vial of prussic acid. In the end, before she leaves the Thonon hotel, Giulia asks one favor of Ashenden: ‘‘He had a wristwatch that I gave him last Christmas. It cost twelve pounds. Can I have it back?’’ Bibliography: Ashenden; Complete Stories. I. East and West.
‘‘GOOD MANNERS’’ (1907). A short story, in which the †Narrator attends one of the dinner parties given by †Augustus Breton, at which the host explains how he came by bottles of an excellent port that has been in his cellar for a long time. He begins with the sale of Graveney Hall, the largest house in the
GORDON, RUTH
71
Kentish neighborhood, to a Baron von Bernheim, reportedly a millionaire who made a vast fortune in South Africa. He turns out to be, however, Johann Herz, a well-known Continental swindler. The Baron takes a great interest in the affairs of the village and pours money into public improvements. Through a common neighbor, †Lady Elizabeth, the Baron attempts to arrange a meeting with Breton, but in vain; the latter is too proud to meet with him. Thus, von Bernheim comes to Breton’s house, the two have lunch, and the latter succumbs to the Baron’s fascination. At one of the Baron’s dinners, the host serves the very port that has become the object of Breton’s story and even sends Breton six bottles of the wine. One day, Lady Elizabeth bears the news that Baron von Bernheim is, in reality, Johann Herz and that he has been carrying out schemes throughout England (including taking £500 of Elizabeth’s money). A warrant has been issued for his arrest, and he is, supposedly, already in custody. Breton exhibits shock, particularly because he had invited the Baron for lunch that afternoon. Nonetheless, at exactly 2:00 P.M., the Baron enters Breton’s door. An hour later, after lunch and a discussion of Italian art, the Baron leaves. Three months later Breton reads of his arrest at Naples; he is brought to England and sentenced to seven years in Portland Prison. At an auction at Graveney Hall, Breton buys the rest of the port. He waits until this day, when he relates his story, to drink the port. It is the day of Johann Herz’s release from prison. Interestingly, Graveney, Kent, will reappear thirty-six years later as the setting for Maugham’s antiwar novel *The Hour before the Dawn (1942). Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories.
GORDON, RUTH (1896–1985). This versatile American actress first appeared on the stage in 1915, performing such roles as Margery Pinchwife in a revival of The Country Wife by William Wycherley (1640–1715); the title character of Serena Blandish, the 1929 adaptation of the novel by *Samuel Nathaniel Behrman (1893–1973), published anonymously but reportedly by Enid Algerine Bagnold (1889–1981); and in various Shakespearean productions. In 1929, she married *Garson Kanin, who, beginning in the 1930s, took on-the-spot notes of anecdotes and conversational pieces on Maugham that he edited and published a year after the writer’s death. Gordon’s initial meeting with *Maugham probably occurred in the summer or early fall of 1928, at one or more of the string of luncheons hosted by the critic and writer *Alexander Woollcott (1887–1943) and the film and vaudeville comedian (Arthur) Harpo Marx (1893–1961) at their rented villa at Antibes on the French Riviera. In that same ‘‘season,’’ the writer invited Marx, Woollcott, and Gordon to the *Villa Mauresque; he greeted Woollcott warmly but ignored the others. Gordon and Maugham eventually became friends when, in April 1937 at a London party, Maugham asked the actress to accompany him to Brighton for a
72
GOSSE, EDMUND WILLIAM
performance of the revival of his play *The Constant Wife (1926), to see if ‘‘something’’ could be done about the acting of Ruth Chatterton (1893–1961), presumably a friend of Gordon. Gordon reported that Chatterton’s performance required nothing; the problem concerned the play, which had become outdated. Such expressions of frankness had always appealed to the playwright. Bibliography: Freedley and Reeves; Gordon; Kanin; Morgan.
GOSSE, EDMUND WILLIAM (1849–1928). English biographer, poet, and critical essayist. The son of the eminent marine zoologist, Plymouth Brother, and fanatical fundamentalist, Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), he came to London from Devonshire in 1867, where he had received a private education, to work as a transcriber for the British Museum (1867–1875). He married in 1875 and in that year took a post as a translator for the Board of Trade (1875–1904). His interest in poetry led to friendships with Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), Robert Browning (1812– 1889), and Matthew Arnold (1822–1888). He declined a professorship in English literature at Harvard, but in 1883 he received an appointment as Clark Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1904 to 1914 he served as librarian to the House of Lords, receiving knighthood in 1925. Gosse began his critical work with Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe (1879); in his work on Scandinavian literature he introduced the name of *Henrik Ibsen into England. Then followed biographies of Thomas Gray (1882), William Congreve (1888), John Donne (1899, Jeremy Taylor (1904), Coventry Patmore (1905), Sir Thomas Browne (1905), Ibsen (1907), Swinburne (1917), the French poet Franc¸oise de Malherbe (1920), and his own father (1890), as well as essays written regularly for the Sunday Times. However, his best and best-known work remains Father and Son (1907), an account of his own struggle between the temperaments and consciences of his father and him, leaving the reader to wonder how the sanity of the son could have survived the stifling dogmas of the father. By his own admission, Gosse classified both the experience and the book that describes it as a comic tragedy, wherein the ‘‘narrative of a spiritual struggle should mingle merriment and humour with a discussion of the most solemn subjects.’’ There are scholars who might conclude that Gosse’s *homosexuality grew out of this early trauma. *Maugham’s relationship with Gosse began early in the former’s career when Gosse (among others) rose to defend the attacks of plagiarism leveled at *Liza of Lambeth (1897) from the literary press. During the years immediately following Maugham’s departure from St. Thomas’s Hospital, London (1898–1903), Maugham proved a regular Sunday afternoon visitor at the Gosses’ London home, 17 Hanover Terrace—the same house occupied, a half century earlier, by the widowed Mrs. Collins and her three sons, the novelist William Wilkie (1824–1889), and the artists Charles Allston (1828–1873) and William the younger. There he either saw or actually met the likes of *Henry James, *Tho-
GRANVILLE-BARKER, HARLEY
73
mas Hardy, George Moore, *Max Beerbohm, and *Edward Marsh; there he listened to Gosse, the ultimate late-Victorian and ‘‘the official man of British letters’’ (according to *H. G. Wells) preside over literary discussions. Thus, in *Cakes and Ale (1930), the character of †Allgood Newton, the best-known critic in England, may well be a playful caricature of Gosse. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); DNB; Drabble; Gosse; Morgan; Weinreb and Hibbert.
GRACE (1910). See under LANDED GENTRY. GRANVILLE-BARKER, HARLEY (1877–1946). English writer, actor, and producer. Born in London, where his mother taught elocution, he began his acting career in 1891 at age fourteen with the stock company of Sarah Thorne (1837–1899) at Margate, London, and worked on the stage for the next nine years, most notably with the open-air Shakespeare touring organization of Sir Philip Ben Greet [Philip Barling] (1857–1936). He entered theater management first with the Stage Society, then at Royal Court Theatre, London (1904–1907), producing the classics, Shakespeare, *Galsworthy, and *Shaw. From 1907 to 1914, he managed at the Savoy Theatre, where he produced his own work (Waste [1907], The Madras House [1910]), Galsworthy, Shakespeare, and a version of *Thomas Hardy’s novel The Dynasts. After spending much of 1914– 1918 in New York, he retired from the stage and became president of the British Drama League and director of the British Institute of the University of Paris (1937–1939). Granville-Barker’s most noted plays include The Voysey Inheritance (1905) and The Marrying of Ann Leete (1901). He collaborated with his second wife, the American poet Helen Huntington, in translations of plays from the Spanish by Gregorio Martinez Sierra (1881–1947) and the brothers Serafin (1871–1938) and Joaquin (1873–1944) Alvarez Quintero and wrote the series of prefaces the five-volume New Players Shakespeare (1927–1945). His scholarly contributions include The Exemplary Theatre (1922), On Dramatic Method (1931), On Poetry in Drama (1937), and The Use of Drama (1946). Granville-Barker played the role of †Basil Kent in the Stage Society production of *Maugham’s *A Man of Honour, which opened on 22 February 1903 at the Imperial Theatre. It closed after two performances. For that reason, perhaps, Maugham admitted to having held little respect for Granville-Barker or his plays; he thought him conceited, ignorant of the masses, and generally difficult to deal with. Yet, the two appear to have remained always on speaking terms. Granville-Barker produced Maugham’s *Lady Frederick at the Court Theatre in 1907 and invited Maugham to write an original play for the 1910 season there; Maugham declined. Finally, in 1940, both Maugham and Granville-Barker found themselves in New York as colleagues working for the British Information Service.
74
GREAT NOVELISTS AND THEIR NOVELS
Bibliography: Summing Up; Cordell; Curtis (1977); DNB; Drabble; Freedley and Reeves; Gassner and Quinn; Hartnoll; Morgan.
GREAT NOVELISTS AND THEIR NOVELS: ESSAYS ON THE TEN GREATEST NOVELS OF THE WORLD AND THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO WROTE THEM (1948). A collection of essays intended to serve as introductions to a series of novels. These pieces were initially published at Philadelphia by John C. Winston Company, a firm that specialized in the publication of Bibles; in London by *William Heinemann in 1954 as *Ten Novels and Their Authors; revised for Doubleday (Garden City, New York) in 1955 as The Art of Fiction: An Introduction to Ten Novels and Their Authors; published again in New York by Fawcett in 1962 as W. Somerset Maugham Selects the Ten Greatest Novels; reprinted in New York (1977) by Arno Press. All of the essays, except the one on Tolstoy, had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly during 1947– 1948. As *Maugham indicated in his introduction, he had edited and abridged the novels and written the essays on the understanding that they would be read by students in schools and colleges; thus, he had rid them of ‘‘excess baggage.’’ Further, in a not too indirect reference and tribute to his own fiction, Maugham maintained that the ten writers had told good stories, without having resorted to literary ‘‘tricks’’ (e.g., flashback and stream of consciousness). In addition, he declared that he had delved into the writers’ lives and personalities as means of explaining and explicating their works. He closed with a postscript demonstrating what had to be combined with the creative instinct to produce work of significant literary value. Maugham wrote essays on Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Honore de Balzac’s Old Man Goriot, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Stendhal’s (Marie Henri Beyle) The Red and the Black, Emily Bronte¨’s Wuthering Heights, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. One wonders how Maugham, in selecting such novels, could have kept his mind only on their ‘‘stories’’ and neglected or lost sight of their writers’ employment of extremely complicated literary devices. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
EL GRECO (‘‘the Greek’’) [Domenikos Theotokopoulos] (1541–1614). Born in Candia, Crete, the Spanish painter studied in *Italy, possibly with Titian [Tiziano Vercelli] (?–1576), and settled in Toledo c.1577. In that year, he received a commission to execute the decorations for the new church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, the centerpiece being the Assumption of the Virgin. Then he became a portrait painter whose reputation fluctuated because of his characteristic distortions of his subjects. The paintings that followed exist as a curious blend of the Italian mannerism and baroque rhythm, with elongated, flamelike figures, arbitrary lighting and color, and almost impressionistic brush-
EL GRECO
75
work. The Burial of Count Orgaz (1586), in the Church of Santo Tome, Toledo, remains among his noteworthy pieces. Although most of his work hangs in the Museo del Greco, Toledo, his Baptism, Crucifixion and Resurrection may be seen in the Prado, Madrid; his Self-Portrait and View of Toledo in the Metropolitan Museum, New York; a version of the Purification of the Temple and Christ’s Agony in Gethsemane in the National Gallery, London. His attraction has always been as a visionary painter who produced dynamic representations of religious ecstasy. In 1913, *Maugham read a biographical sketch of El Greco by the French novelist, essayist, and nationalist politician Auguste Maurice Barres (1862– 1923). He became fascinated by the metaphysical outlook of the painter, particularly recognizing, once he went to Paris to view the works, how his striking distortions of the human body and greater concern for color than for drawing made him a precursor to the moderns. Thus, through †Philip Carey in *Of Human Bondage (1915), the reader can sense Maugham’s excitement of having seen El Greco’s work. Maugham’s opinions of, and attitudes toward, El Greco come forth in a fairly extended essay in *Don Fernando (1935). The writer attempts to penetrate the character of the painter, ignoring his paintings on the ground that ‘‘nothing is so tedious as a description of the greens, yellows, and blues that are in a picture; you cannot visualise them even with a photograph before you and the narrator’s enthusiasm does not matter to you a row of pins.’’ Perhaps what Maugham admired about El Greco was that he represented a man of education, culture, and pleasant discourse. Most important, however, El Greco had a keen eye on the profits of his trade. He made a great deal of money. . . . Like many another artist before and after him, he was a shrewd business man. . . . He repeated pictures as often as he was required to. There are two or three versions at least of most of his paintings and of St. Francis in Meditation there are, it appears, over twenty.
Erase the proper nouns from this section of the essay, and the reader might well be gazing at a fragment directly from Maugham’s autobiography (if one existed). The one portion of the essay that has generated the most discussion among Maugham scholars concerns El Greco’s supposed *homosexuality, a subject that Maugham thought worth considering. To begin, he dismisses the notion that an artist’s sexual life has any significant bearing upon the art produced by that person. ‘‘But,’’ he maintains, ‘‘when it comes to an abnormality the case is different,’’ principally because ‘‘the homosexual has a narrower outlook on the world than the normal man.’’ Maugham outlines the strictly biographical reasons for El Greco’s presumed tortured fantasy and sinister strangeness that suggests sexual abnormality. He then concludes that the painter’s *homosexuality has indeed prevented him from achieving the highest position among artists. ‘‘It may be that in this abnormality lies the explanation why his pictures fail of that ultimate greatness which is release. They thrill; they do not give you peace.
76
GREENE, HENRY GRAHAM
They excite, but do not satisfy.’’ Again, is Maugham speculating upon El Greco’s abnormality and El Greco’s inability to attain the first rank of genius, or is he, at age sixty-one, reflecting upon the failings of his own life and of his own work? Bibliography: Don Fernando; Crystal; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Morgan.
GREENE, HENRY GRAHAM (1904–1991). English novelist. Born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, he attended Berkhamsted School (his father being headmaster there) and studied at Balliol College, Oxford. Converting in 1926 from Anglicanism to Catholicism, he moved to London to become a journalist with the Times and then a freelance writer. His early novels, beginning with The Man Within (1929) and ‘‘entertainments’’ such as Stamboul Train (1932) and The Third Man (1950), rely on melodramatic techniques of the mystery thriller. His major works, however, focus upon central religious issues: Brighton Rock (1938), The Confidential Agent (1939), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951), Our Man in Havana (1958), and A Burnt Out Case (1961). Other important pieces include The Quiet American (1955) and The Human Factor (1978). Among Greene’s later pieces one recognizes Dr. Fischer of Geneva (1980), Monsignor Quixote (1982), and The Tenth Man (1985). Greene focused, for themes and techniques, upon moral dilemma, good–evil as opposed to right–wrong, somewhat ‘‘seedy’’ locations for his characters and plots, and variations on the popular thriller and detective story. He spent a lengthy residence at Antibes on the French Riviera. Greene, both a friend of *Maugham and on more than one occasion a reviewer of his work, generally thought that Maugham’s fiction, particularly the short stories, reflected his supreme ability to capture the more interesting aspects of human nature. However, he thought the very short stories of *Cosmopolitans (1936) failed to echo genuine life and that, on the whole, Maugham’s agnosticism robbed the majority of his fictional characters (particularly in *Of Human Bondage) of their individuality. The 1935 *Don Fernando, he believed, stood as Maugham’s best work. In the end, though, Greene did admire Maugham’s dedication to his craft. Bibliography: Cordell; Crystal; Curtis (1974/1977); DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
GREIN, JACK [JACOB] THOMAS (1862–1935). Born in Holland, Grein became a naturalized Englishman in 1895 and, as an actor, playwright, manager, and drama critic, contributed significantly to fostering the productions of new ‘‘plays of ideas’’ in London at the turn of the century. Beginning as a critic of the modern English stage for the Dutch Art Chronicle, he functioned as an international intermediary for the exchange of plays between England and the Continent. In 1891, he founded at the Royalty Theatre the Independent Theatre of London to promote plays of literary and artistic value, rather than those simply having commercial or popular appeal. Thus, early plays of *Henrik Ibsen
GREIN, JACK [JACOB] THOMAS
77
and *George Bernard Shaw gained their precarious footholds upon the English stage. Grein also contributed significantly to the Stage Society, which gave birth at the Royal Court Theatre to the 1904–1907 management partnership of *Harley Granville-Barker and John E. Vedrenne (1867–1930). Grein served as drama critic of Life (1889–1893); authored reviews in French, German, and Dutch for the Continental journals; and became critic of the Sunday Special (merged into the Sunday Times) until 1918. He published five volumes of his Dramatic Criticism, covering the period 1898–1903, as well as two other volumes of drama criticism (1921, 1924). Even before *Maugham and Grein became friends, the latter proved a tireless but honest and frank champion of the playwright. Initially, he rushed to the defense of the short-lived *Man of Honour (1903), maintaining that Maugham would become a man of destiny for the English stage. He later (1908) declared that one had to go back to the days (1860–1890) of Victorien Sardou (1831– 1908) in Paris to find a playwright with such overwhelming popularity as Maugham. However, a year later (1909), Grein objected to Maugham’s depiction of Jews in *Smith, while he considered *The Tenth Man (1910) Maugham’s first dramatic blunder. Bibliography: Curtis (1977); DNB; Hartnoll; Morgan.
H ‘‘THE HAIRLESS MEXICAN’’ (1927). A short story included in *Ashenden. Critically, the piece has been recognized as a thrilling spy story enlivened by rich humor and a swift but shocking ending (shocking, at least, for the time in which it was written). †Ashenden comes from Geneva to meet Colonel †R. at Lyons, and he orders him to Naples, Italy, under the name of †Somerville and in company with †Manuel Carmona, the Hairless Mexican (‘‘ ‘Because he’s hairless and because he’s a Mexican’ ’’) and reportedly a general in the army of President Victoriano Huerta (1854–1916). Carmona wears a pale brown wig and speaks English well, ‘‘with a Spanish accent, but with an American intonation.’’ The point of it all focuses on certain documents to be carried from Constantinople to the German Embassy in Rome by †Constantine Andreadi, a Greek spy in the employ of †Enver Pasha. R. wants to prevent Andreadi from getting to Rome; that task goes to Carmona, who will be paid by Ashenden once the documents have been delivered to him. After a lengthy train ride, during which Ashenden loses 1,000 francs to Carmona at piquet and listens to his stories about the loss of his wealth in *Mexico and his conquests of the opposite sex (including a lengthy narrative of his slitting the throat of a beautiful spy as she lay in bed with him), they arrive in Naples. Ashenden leaves the train, and Carmona goes on to Brindisi to intercept Andreadi (traveling under the name of †Lombardos) and the documents. Four days later, Carmona returns (in a different wig), having made friends with Andreadi and quartered him in Ashenden’s hotel. That night, Carmona disposes of Andreadi but cannot find the documents. He and Ashenden search the Greek’s hotel room but uncover nothing. Upon leaving the hotel with Carmona (who by now has reverted to his original blond wig), Ashenden finds a coded cable from R., which he reads in the train station following an interval of dining and danc-
‘‘THE HAPPY COUPLE’’
79
ing in a sordid tavern. ‘‘Constantine Andreadi has been detained by illness at Piraeus. He will be unable to sail. Return Geneva and await instructions.’’ Carmona has killed the wrong man! Bibliography: Ashenden; Complete Stories. I. East and West.
‘‘THE HAPPY COUPLE’’ (1908). A short story, the original version dating 1908, with a revision in 1947 (see next entry). †Miss Ley, a delightful old maid, rents a cottage on the river for a fortnight. She discovers the couple in the neighboring cottage, †Mr. and †Mrs. Craig—middle-aged, of some means, and with a one-year-old infant—to be worthy of study. She notices, from a distance, the affection that Mrs. Craig bestows upon her husband and child. Miss Ley invents a story about them, complete with Christian names, Edwin and Angelina (Maugham has dipped into Oliver Goldsmith’s ballad [1764] included in The Vicar of Wakefield [1766]). In her mind, the man goes forth to the Colonies to earn his fortune, planning to marry Angelina upon his return. Not until twenty years later do the fortune and Edwin’s return occur, and the two finally marry. ‘‘Their love is founded on illusion,’’ she concludes, ‘‘. . . but since it has to them all the appearances of reality, what does it matter?’’ Dr. †Frank Hurrell, Miss Ley’s closest friend (and half her age) and an assistant physician at St. Luke’s Hospital, pays a visit. From her window, he seems to recognize Mr. Craig but cannot recall when or where. Out for a walk, Frank and Miss Ley meet the Craigs, and the couple stand in shock when they see the physician. Mrs. Craig faints, and when Miss Ley asks why Hurrell will not assist her, he responds, ‘‘She doesn’t want me. Besides, the man’s a doctor.’’ Hurrell then tells Miss Ley of the murder of †Miss Wingfield, a rich old spinster who lived with a companion in the country. She died suddenly, and the companion was arrested and charged with poisoning her employer. Hurrell had been a prosecution witness as a medical expert. The principal witness for the defendant, †Dr. Brownley, had been Miss Wingfield’s physician. The jury could not agree on a verdict, and the judge ordered a new trial, this time with Brownley and the companion as codefendants. Again, the jury could not agree. A week later, Brownley married the companion. Hurrell returns to London, and on the following day, the Craigs’ †Maid tells Miss Ley that her employers had fled in the night. ‘‘[F]or Miss Ley, that was the end of Edwin and Angelina.’’ Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories.
‘‘THE HAPPY COUPLE’’ (1947). A short story written in 1908 (see preceding entry) and then revised and expanded for the collection *Creatures of Circumstance (1947). The †Narrator admits to not liking †Sir Edward Landon, a judge at the Old Bailey and a member of his club. However, Landon does allow him access to interesting trials and proves willing to discuss those cases with him. During a vacation on the Riviera, Landon has dinner at the Narrator’s house at Cap Ferrat, in company with a mature but attractive neighbor, †Miss Gray,
80
‘‘THE HAPPY MAN’’
and the next day the two men visit her house at St. Jean. She anticipates the arrival of her new neighbors, †George Craig and his wife (Miss Gray has given them the names Edwin and Angelina; see 1908 entry), a middle-aged couple with a one-year-old child, who heretofore have ignored her. Miss Gray has been fascinated by the couple’s devotion to each other and to their child, and she had invented a story about them (see 1908 version, except that Edwin goes to South America or Malaya). When the Craigs arrive, and Miss Gray proceeds with introductions, Landon appears surprised to see the couple and asks if they had not met before. Mrs. Craig becomes terrified, but Craig recovers, and the lunch proceeds. Suddenly Craig rises from his chair and falls to the floor; he recovers, and the Narrator and Mrs. Craig help him home. The next morning, Miss Gray phones the Narrator, reporting that the Craigs have left, complete with baby, †Nurse, and luggage. Then Landon tells the Narrator the story of the Craigs. Landon’s narrative essentially parallels †Frank Hurrell’s 1908 version, except that Maugham changes names. Miss †Wingfield becomes Miss †Wingford; Dr. †Brownley changes to Dr. †Brandon; and the †Companion takes on a name, Miss †Starling. Landon’s narrative also includes a †Maid to Miss Wingford, who had been with her for thirty years. Angry because she has been left out of her former employer’s will and that the entire £60,000–70,000 will go to Miss Starling, the Maid accuses Miss Starling of poisoning Miss Wingford. After exhumation of the body and a coroner’s jury, Miss Starling and Brandon stand trial for murder before Judge Landon. The two are acquitted. Landon believes that no one had proved that Miss Starling and Dr. Brandon have ever been lovers. She was prepared to commit murder to get the man she loved, but she was not prepared to have an illicit love affair with him. Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance.
‘‘THE HAPPY MAN’’ (1924). A short story written in 1924 and then included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). The †Narrator (most obviously *Maugham) recalls an incident when, as a young, nonpracticing medical man, he lived in a modest apartment in London near Victoria Station. One afternoon he admits a total stranger, Dr. †Stephens, who has just read his latest book on Spain [The Land of the Blessed Virgin (1905)]. Raised by two old aunts, never having been anywhere, married for six years, and a medical officer at the Camberwell Infirmary, Stephens admits to having had enough. He inquires if there would be any chance for an English doctor in Spain. The Narrator tells him that ‘‘if you don’t want money but are content to earn just enough to keep body and soul together, then go. For you will lead a wonderful life.’’ Fifteen years later, while in Seville, *Spain, the Narrator, not feeling well, asks the hotel †Porter if he knows of an English doctor in the town. The latter replies in the affirmative and gives the Narrator the address, and the latter goes off to be treated by none other than Stephens, now fat and bald. His wife had
HARDY, THOMAS
81
returned to Camberwell, he now has a Spanish mistress, he is terribly poor, but he thoroughly enjoys life. Bibliography: Complete Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
HARDY, THOMAS (1840–1928). English novelist and poet, born at Upper Bockhampton, Dorset, the son of a stonemason. Following his early education in Dorsetshire, he apprenticed to an architect at the age of sixteen, before moving (1862) to London to work for an architect and write poetry that expressed his attachment to the rural life. At this point he lost his religious faith. Finding publication of his work difficult, he returned to Dorchester, wrote fiction, and eventually achieved success in 1874 with Far from the Madding Crowd. He married Emma Gifford (d.1912) that same year. Hardy then took up the profession of letters and established himself with The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1896). Those pieces tended toward the tragic and appeared increasingly pessimistic in tone. He then returned to poetry, writing sardonic lyrics, elegies to Emma Gifford, and the epic drama The Dynasts (1903–1908). Two years after Emma’s death, he married (1914) Florence Hardy, a distant relative, she (b.1879) being thirty-five at the time, he seventy-four. Hardy’s major fictional themes look to the innate corruption of the world, the struggle of human beings against the indifferences in the world, and the sufferings and ironies of life and love. *Maugham met Hardy in October 1908 at a dinner party at the Portland Place house of Lady St. Helier, the prominent Victorian hostess. Maugham thought that even in his boiled shirt and high collar, Hardy looked every bit the rustic, exuding an odd mixture of shyness and self-assurance. The two writers talked for forty-five minutes, at the end of which Hardy could not recall Maugham’s name or his profession. However, so far as concerned Maugham and his fiction, Hardy’s death became far more important than an insignificant meeting at an equally insignificant dinner party. In a letter to the French critic Paul Dottin on 1 January 1931, Maugham admitted that the pomp of Hardy’s funeral (see under *CAKES AND ALE) had given him the idea for Cakes and Ale (1930). †Edward Driffield, author of Cup of Life, as with Hardy, the creator of Jude the Obscure, had risen to become a legendary figure simply by managing to endure, gathering admirers about him, and maintaining a dignified exterior. However, Maugham himself had to endure following the publication of Cakes and Ale. In addition to the †Alroy Kear–*Hugh Walpole controversy, those critics and literary reviewers loyal to the memory of Hardy came down hard on Maugham, accusing him of malice and a lack of charity. They actually believed that the novel had soiled the memory of the relatively recently departed Dorset novelist and poet. In a letter to Walpole written sometime in late 1930, Maugham bemoaned that he had been ‘‘attacked in the papers because they think my old man [Driffield] is intended as a portrait of Hardy. It is absurd. The
82
HARE, AUGUSTUS JOHN CUTHBERT
only grounds are that both died old, received the order [Order of Merit] and were married twice. You know that for my story I needed this and that there is nothing of Hardy in my character.’’ Indeed, if one examines the dissimilarities between the fictional Edward Driffield and the actual Thomas Hardy—their wives, their interests, their economic states, their social habits—they far outnumber the similarities. Of course, Maugham probably cared less who attacked him or how many stones they threw at him; as long as it all remained outside the courts, the notoriety, if it did nothing else, sold books. Perhaps most important, Edward Driffield really exists as a minor character in the novel, and the Maugham–Hardy controversy represents, from a strictly literary point of view, an interesting but minor endnote. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Crystal; Curtis (1974/1977); DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
HARE, AUGUSTUS JOHN CUTHBERT (1834–1903). English topographical writer and nephew of the noted Anglican theologian Julius Charles Hare (1795– 1855). Born at Rome, he received his formal education first at Harrow and then at University College, Oxford. When not walking or writing, Hare spent his time at house parties and dinner, for, as an admitted snob, he managed to be happy only in the presence of the upper classes. His guidebooks assured his popularity among generations of travelers in Europe and England, for his observations proved exceedingly sharp and meticulous. Hare resided at Holmhurst, a house in which he maintained the Victorian life and refused to recognize that the world was nearing the twentieth century. He conducted morning prayers, did not permit smoking in the house, kept a cottage for gentlewomen of reduced means, and sent everyone to bed at ten o’clock. His major works include Walks in Rome (1871), Wanderings in Spain (1873), Cities of Northern and Central Italy (1876), Walks in London (1878), Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily (1883), and Sussex (1894). His detailed autobiography, written during 1896–1900 and intended for only a few members of his private social circle, appeared in London in 1905 as In My Solitary Life. *Maugham met Hare in 1898 through an introduction by his friend the Reverend Albert Basil Orme Wilberforce (1841–1916), the archdeacon of Westminster and the chaplain to the speaker of the House of Commons, who had recommended *Liza of Lambeth (1897) to his congregation. The old man had admired the novel, invited its author to Holmhurst, and did his best to teach him manners. However, after reading *Mrs. Craddock (1902), both Hare and Rev. Wilberforce regretted Maugham’s ‘‘Zola-like realism’’ and lamented that his talent could not be devoted to ‘‘nobler aims.’’ A half century later, in discussing Hare, Maugham identified him as a finicky snob, spinsterish, and petty. However he respected his travel books and could not understand how ‘‘such a hot-bottle-and-mittens type’’ could walk everywhere. Finally, Maugham wrote a fifty-page essay, ‘‘Augustus,’’ on Hare and included it in his 1952 collection,
HAWTREY, SIR CHARLES HENRY
83
*The Vagrant Mood. It exists as a memoir and an account of his subject’s writings and travels; more important, Maugham recalls the self-contained world of a Victorian household presided over by a figurehead who possessed the qualities of both an eccentric and a gentleman. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Chambers; Cordell; Curtis (1977); DNB; Morgan.
HAWAII. Bound eventually for *Tahiti, *Maugham and his secretary/companion *Gerald Haxton sailed from San Francisco to Honolulu, Oahu, in early November 1916 aboard the cruise ship SS Great Northern, hoping for first-class food and accommodations. Rather than mix with the four hundred other passengers, the two remained in their cabin and played cards. However, Maugham did manage to meet, for the first time, *Bert Alanson, the San Francisco stockbroker who would be responsible for the writer’s eventual wealth. The ship docked on 14 November 1916; Gerald and Maugham lodged in the Alexander Young Hotel and spent three weeks touring the island, including the Iwilei redlight district and the prostitutes’ shacks. Notwithstanding his own preferences, Maugham sought material for his fiction, not pleasure. However, Gerald had struck up a friendship with Judge Clarence W. Ashford, and when the police conducted a night raid at Iwilei and arrested 108 prostitutes and fifteen pimps, the judge invited Maugham and Gerald to attend the trial, which landed the women a sentence of one year probation. Also during those three weeks, Maugham and Alanson took the Inter-Island Steamship Company boat to Hilo, Hawaii, where they viewed the eruption of the Kilauea volcano. Of the seven pieces in the 1921 collection, *The Trembling of a Leaf, *‘‘Rain’’ deals in part with the Iwilei district of Honolulu; the title of *‘‘Honolulu’’ speaks for itself (‘‘Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu,’’ says the †Narrator); and the sketch *‘‘The Pacific’’ includes direct and indirect references to Hawaii. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
HAWTREY, SIR CHARLES HENRY (1858–1923). The English actor, manager, and light comedian. The son of a clergyman and master at Eton, he studied at Eton and then almost immediately went on the stage. His first appearance came in 1881 under the name of Banks at the old Prince of Wales Theatre, London. Shortly thereafter, he went into management for himself. He typified the English gentleman and man-about-town of his time, immaculately dressed and complete with a mustache that he shaved only if a play failed. Hawtrey excelled in parts where he had to tell lies, which he did easily and naturally. He became so popular in what were termed ‘‘Hawtrey parts’’ that he was permitted to play little else; between 1883 and 1923, he produced and acted in more than eighty plays. Despite his stage and production successes, Hawtrey, a known gambler, often found himself in financial difficulty, for he had little concern for money. A man of culture and charm, Hawtrey also studied the Bible
84
HAXTON, GERALD
and could supply a text on any occasion. In 1922, he earned knighthood for service to his profession. Hawtrey opened *Maugham’s *Jack Straw on 26 March 1908 at the Vaudeville Theatre, the Strand, London, and the piece ran for 321 performances, stopping only because the actor had appendicitis. He appeared on stage first as a bearded waiter, which required the passage of a number of minutes before his followers in the audience recognized and then applauded him. On 20 March 1909, Hawtrey starred in a burlesque of a Spanish duke in Maugham’s *The Noble Spaniard at the Royalty Theatre, London, but the piece lasted for only fifty-five performances. Apparently, Hawtrey had not fully recovered from his appendicitis the year before and lacked his usual charm and gusto. Bibliography: DNB; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
HAXTON, GERALD (1892–1944). *Maugham’s thirty-year relationship with Haxton, technically an American because of his San Francisco birth, began in late October or early November 1914 in Flanders, where both served in the same British ambulance unit. His father, George, an American, and his mother, Sarah, English, had separated early in his childhood, and thus the boy had been raised in England by his mother (after whom he would name his forty-five ton fishing boat, *Sara). According to those who knew or had seen him (and most largely disliked him), Haxton did not present an overly pleasant appearance: middle height, vague brown hair, mustache, pockmarked face (over which he often applied makeup to cover the scars), uneven white teeth, large blue-gray eyes, and a shifty stare. On the other hand, few could deny that Haxton’s immense vitality and adventurous spirit combined well with his carefully cultivated gregarious manner. But again, such of his detractors as *S. N. Behrman interpreted Haxton’s outwardness as ‘‘an easy routine, a patter he had developed to use on outsiders like myself. There was never anything genuinely personal. It was like a document prepared by a cunning enemy in a war, a document intended to be captured.’’ Others declared that the real effect of Haxton upon those with whom he came into contact depended upon the level of his intoxication when they met. Despite his being generally despised by Maugham’s wide circle of friends and acquaintances, and as much trouble and expense as he brought to the relationship of three decades, one can easily see why Haxton stood as the love of Maugham’s life. Simply, Haxton possessed what Maugham lacked; Haxton’s outwardness, athleticism, amiability, and popularity—his natural ability for social intercourse—compensated for Maugham’s shyness, reserve, stiffness, and thrift. Simply, Maugham’s success as a writer of drama and fiction depended on examining and knowing people whom he could transpose onto his pages as characters; through Gerald Haxton, he was able to meet those people. Thus, the secretary/companion/lover also served as a real professional necessity, and Maugham took Haxton with him whenever he could in his worldwide search
HEARD, HENRY FITZGERALD
85
for material. There are scholars who would, with confidence, draw a firm line between the Maugham–Haxton relationship and Maugham’s literary success: that everything Maugham produced following *Of Human Bondage (1915) through to *The Razor’s Edge (1944) came during the period of his liaison with Haxton; that Maugham’s literary success grew steadily out of that liaison. Nonetheless, the relationship had its negative moments. Haxton, an alcoholic, proved a most violent, unscrupulous, dishonest, and unfaithful companion. More important, he demonstrated early a propensity for getting into trouble. On 13 November 1915, he and a John Linsdell were caught in a hotel room in the Covent Garden section of London, charged with gross indecency and prosecuted under Section 11 of the *Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Although acquitted, Haxton remained outside England until February 1919; upon his return from Copenhagen, he received a deportation order for a number of unspecified reasons (which cannot be determined until his papers can be opened in 2019). Thus, when Haxton became his official secretary, Maugham found himself forced to live outside England. However, Haxton’s sexual conduct proved not the only problem for Maugham. Haxton also gambled compulsively and cheated in the process. Maugham often complained that his gambling, in addition to his passions for drink and sex, caused considerable strain on the writer’s traveling expenses. Indeed, as their relationship progressed, Maugham had to undergo the transition from lover to grandfather, watching over Haxton, the delinquent grandchild, trying in vain to control his excessive behavior—for Haxton apparently could do nothing in moderation. In the end, after a quarter century of dissipation, on 7 December 1944, at Doctors Hospital, New York, Haxton, at age fifty-two, succumbed to an attack of edema in the lung. Maugham’s stormy relationship Gerald Haxton may be seen most obviously in two of Maugham’s works. In †Tony Paxton in *Our Betters (1915), there emerges the picture of the young sportsman and lover, a bridge player, a spendthrift, and a chaser of Gaiety girls. He lies, gambles, and idles away his time. He cheats on the †Duchess de Surennes but, upon discovery, does not even attempt to excuse himself. He makes a fool of the Duchess, but she loves only more. In the novel *Up at the Villa (1941), Maugham further fans the rumor that Haxton had, for years, been blackmailing him, perhaps the result of a *homosexual scandal. At any rate, †Rowley Flint assists †Mary Panton in disposing of a body, and then she must marry him. Bibliography: Behrman (1972); Calder (1989/1990), (1972/1973); Curtis; Robin Maugham (1981, 1972, 1966); Morgan.
HEARD, HENRY FITZGERALD (1889–1971). Identified as a prominent intellectual of the 1930s, Gerald Heard knew a number of leading scientists and philosophers. He even read scientific talks over the BBC. According to the gossip among those intellectuals, Heard read two thousand books each year and retained extraordinary quantities of information about almost every field and
86
HEINEMANN, WILLIAM
discipline. He advanced the Vedantist philosophy in his book The Social Substance of Religion (1931), where he stated that the chaos of the modern world could be controlled only by religion, while in his The Third Morality (1937) he advocated vegetarianism and the practice of yoga. Heard went to California in 1937 to follow the teachings of Swami Prabhavananda. Finally, Heard established what he identified as Trabuco College, where he claimed to be a fullfledged yogi, conducting meditations and urging potential followers to eat natural foods and to refrain from driving cars. Heard, along with his friend and companion the novelist *Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894–1963) and the novelist *Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986), had, in the late 1930s, taken up the study of Vedanta, a Hindu system of belief that focused upon the ultimate nature of reality. The system espoused a universal moral order that accounted for cycles of growth and destruction in nature. For the followers of Vedanta, their philosophy meant the extinction of suffering caused by ignorance. Meditation and a vegetarian diet served as its major instruments. In 1937, Heard and then Huxley attached themselves to one Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk of the Ramakrishna Order. The Indian guru found the warm climate of California much to his liking and quickly established a small mission center in Hollywood. Isherwood followed in 1939 to weave his hard-line pacifism into the Swami’s philosophy. Although Gerald Heard has been considered the model for †Larry Darrell in *The Razor’s Edge (1944), the character, according to *Maugham, came from a composite of Heard, Isherwood, and Huxley. As usual, Maugham held only a professional interest in the religious views of the three; he had no intention of becoming one of their converts. Therefore, when he spent time with the three writers in Hollywood beginning in January 1941, he sought to explore their minds and their conversations for source material, already developing in his mind a major fictional character who would emerge three years later. Bibliography: Bedford (1973); Curtis (1977); Isherwood; Morgan.
HEINEMANN, WILLIAM (1863–1920). English publisher. Born at Surbiton, Greater London, Heinemann founded in London in 1889 the publishing house that bore his name and established its reputation with the works of *Robert Louis Stevenson, *Henry James, Joseph Conrad, *Rudyard Kipling, *H. G. Wells, *John Galsworthy, J. B. Priestley, and *Somerset Maugham. In addition, the firm, in an attempt to rival the Leipzig firm of Christian Bernhard Tauchnitz (1816–1895), published the translations of major works from Continental European writers. From the middle of the nineteenth century, Bedford Street had become a center for publishing firms, and Heinemann occupied rooms there between 1889 and 1911. He belonged to that generation of publishers who believed that literary agents contaminated writers; he considered them tricksters and parasites. In November 1902, Heinemann purchased *Maugham’s novel *Mrs. Crad-
THE HERO
87
dock and thus began a literary and commercial relationship that would last for more than sixty years. After 1902, Heinemann published, in various editions and at various times, the novels *The Merry-Go-Round (1904), *The Explorer (1907), *The Magician (1908), *Catalina (1948), Selected Novels (1953), and *The Moon and Sixpence (1979); short story collections Altogether (1934),*East and West (1934),*Cosmopolitans (1936), Here and There (1948), *Quartet (1948), Complete Short Stories (1951), A Maugham Twelve (1966), The Kite and Other Stories (1963, 1968), A Baker’s Dozen (1969), Maugham’s Malaysian Stories (1969), A Second Baker’s Dozen (1970), Hairless Mexican and the Traitor (1974), ‘‘Footprints in the Jungle’’ and Two Other Stories (1975), and Four Modern Story Tellers (1977); the plays *Lady Frederick (1911), *Jack Straw (1911), *The Explorer (1912), *The Unknown (1920), *Caesar’s Wife (1922), *Loaves and Fishes (1923), *Our Betters (1923), *The Unattainable (1923), *The Bread Winner (1930), Dramatic Works (1931–1934), Plays by W. Somerset Maugham (1931), *For Services Rendered (1932), and *Sheppey (1933). Bibliography: Crystal; DNB; Morgan; Weinreb and Hibbert; Whyte.
THE HERO (1901). A novel, written between 8 October 1900 and 14 January 1901 and published in London by Hutchinson and Company; reprinted in New York by Arno Press (1977); recorded for Books on Tape (1985). With this novel, *Maugham broke with the firm of *T. Fisher Unwin. Hutchinson printed 1,500 copies at six shillings per volume, but the work did not achieve a second edition, nor did it find an American publisher. It represents the first appearance on its boards of Maugham’s father’s Moorish symbol (the so-called evil eye), on this occasion printed upside down, no doubt for luck. Maugham would reverse the imprint in all of his subsequent books. Here, Maugham explores the effects of the Boer War (1899–1902) upon English provincial life. †Captain James Parsons earns the Victoria Cross in the Transvaal for attempting to save the life of †Reginald Larcher, a neighbor and comrade. However, the young subaltern is shot and killed as Parsons carries him back to the lines. Parsons returns to the village of Little Primpton, Kent, to his parents and to his fiance´e, †Mary Clibborn. His father, by the way, †Colonel Richmond Parsons, a gentleman and proper Christian, had been drummed out of the service for having been tricked by Indian rebels (themselves neither gentlemen nor Christians), and his command routed. After five years in India and Africa, James has changed to the point where he can no longer endure the insularity, prejudice, pseudopatriotism, and pettiness of this prim and proper village. He observes the actions of Mary, an inveterate, cheerful, but puritanical do-gooder, and becomes so upset and uncomfortable that at one point he declares that had he been a Cape Dutchman, he would have fought against the British in Africa. Indeed, he has even had an affair with †Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace, the dark-haired and olive-skinned daughter of a riding master and a Portuguese woman and the wife of a friend and brother officer in a native regiment. Un-
88
‘‘HIS EXCELLENCY’’
fortunately, James still holds to the Edwardian code that he must act honorably. Since he cannot physically escape from Mary’s missionary zeal and from the hypocrisy and limited vision of Little Primpton—and since Mrs. PritchardWallace is about to marry another man—he takes the only action possible: he shoots himself—an act that contemporary critics considered grotesque. Aside from the irritations caused by Mary Clibborn and Richmond Parsons and his wife †Frances, a number of minor characters go against James’s grain. Frances Parsons summons her brother, †Major William Forsyth, a bumbling bachelor who considers himself a man of the world, to heal the rift between James and Mary. He displays the same incompetence that got him placed on half pay. Then the reader meets the Larchers, the dead subaltern’s family: †Mr. Larcher concerns himself with his flower conservatory; †Mrs. Larcher dotes upon the guests at her tennis party; the buxom and healthy †Larcher daughters play tennis. No one appears upset at the loss of a life. Mary Clibborn’s parents appear cut from similar molds. †Clara Clibborn flirts with young Parsons and, in the end, believes that James killed himself because he could not claim her. †Reginald Clibborn, a retired cavalry officer, still believes he is in the service; he considers himself a gentleman dandy and looks down upon infantrymen (of which young Parsons is one). In challenging the inadequacy of the Edwardian code and the individual’s inability to challenge it, as well as attacking the isolation and insulation of British provincial middle-class society during a time of national crisis, Maugham put his foot into the waters of social and even political criticism. The people of Little Primpton had failed to recognize that ‘‘a new spirit had been in action, eating into the [their] foundations of the national character; it worked through the masses of the great cities, unnerved by the three poisons of drink, the Salvation Army, and popular journalism. A mighty force of hysteria and sensationalism was created, seething, ready to burst its bonds.’’ Unfortunately, his middle-class reading public in 1901 was not yet willing to be attacked; the novel failed both critically and commercially. Maugham reworked the piece into a play, *The Unknown, which opened on 9 August 1920; some can draw easy parallels to the problems confronted by James Parsons returning from the Boer War and the discomfort of young †Larry Darrell in the opening chapters of *The Razor’s Edge (1944), trying to make the transition from World War I to Chicago. Bibliography: Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1974); Curtis and Whitehead; Morgan.
‘‘HIS EXCELLENCY’’ (1928). A short story in the collection *Ashenden. Sent to the unidentified capital of an important and unidentified belligerent state, †Ashenden calls on the British ambassador, †Sir Herbert Witherspoon, and on the American ambassador, †Wilbur Schafer, both of whom have been instructed to dispatch any and all of Ashenden’s coded messages. Schafer, a politician and
‘‘HIS EXCELLENCY’’
89
largely ignorant of foreign affairs, had entered into a relationship with a beautiful †Swedish Woman, a countess suspected of being a German spy, and Ashenden has been instructed ‘‘to deal with’’ the matter. Assisting him is †Herbartus, a powerful and determined Galacian Pole. Ashenden learns that Schafer, a true representative of American informality and regularity, cannot get along with Sir Herbert, an ever truer representative of British stiffness and formality, and he tries to get the two together. The piece appears to move in a different direction when Sir Herbert invites Ashenden to the embassy for dinner, an event that includes only the two of them. There the discussion turns to †Byring, Sir Herbert’s successor as counselor in Paris some thirty years ago who now must leave the service. He had fallen in love with †Rose Auburn, an exquisite beauty, a former dancer who had passed from lover to lover to become the best-known and most expensive courtesan in *France. Through a ‘‘feverish and unending round of senseless debauchery she had preserved an air of virginity.’’ Byring wants to marry her, which causes problems with his superiors. Of course, Ashenden had met and become familiar with Byring and Rose years ago in Paris and had concluded that little difference existed between Rose Auburn and the smart women of Mayfair. The story takes its final turn when Sir Herbert relates the experiences of a friend named †‘‘Brown,’’ a real gentleman with a deep interest in painting whom he had known thirty years ago, when he served the Foreign Office as a junior clerk. On one of his trips to Paris, Brown met a young painter named †O’Malley, who painted his portrait. At dinner with O’Malley and his friend †Yvonne, Brown meets †Alix, a vulgar-looking young woman, a dancer, and a guttersnipe whose only attraction proved to be a deep and husky whiskey voice, which she attributed to ‘‘one of the inconveniences of her profession.’’ Brown tries unsuccessfully to see her again, but she makes excuses. He goes to see Alix’s grotesque performance when her dance troupe comes to London, and on this occasion, pleased to see him, she accepts his invitation to dinner. He follows her to Boulogne, after which he determines that he is madly in love with her. However, Alix leaves with her troupe for North Africa, and Brown becomes engaged to a young woman whose family has political connections. Suddenly, he receives a letter from Alix that rekindles the flame, and for three months prior to his wedding, he travels with her troupe, living in sordid hotels and tolerating those occasions when Alix is too busy to see him. A month after his return, Brown marries his fiance´e, and his spectacular rise in the diplomatic service begins. Although the parallels here prove obvious, they remain interesting. In Brown, who early on in the narrative Ashenden realizes is young Sir Herbert Witherspoon, the reader easily recognizes young †Philip Carey (alias *Maugham himself) from *Of Human Bondage (1915), while Alix functions as a variation on †Mildred Rogers from the same novel, particularly as she keeps flitting in and out of Brown’s life. In the portrait painter O’Malley, Maugham sketches the name of the artist and friend *Gerald Kelly. Once more, this story reveals the
90
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
extent to which Maugham recycled characters and narratives from one piece to another, clinging to the belief that if one first succeeds, then one tries again and again. Bibliography: Ashenden; Complete Stories. I. East and West; Cordell.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA. Maugham’s connections with Hollywood, where the filming of motion pictures began about 1911, can be traced to 1915, when Jesse Lasky (1880–1958), who had formed a production company in 1914, filmed *The Explorer. Two years later (1917) Famous Players filmed *The Land of Promise, followed in 1919 with the Metro Company production of *Lady Frederick (under the title The Divorcee), starring Ethel Barrymore, and the Famous-Players-Lasky production of *Jack Straw, directed by Cecil B. De Mille (1881–1959). In 1920, Maugham even received an offer from Lasky and Samuel Goldwyn (1884–1974) to write films. Lasky and Goldwyn attempted to recruit prominent playwrights under the title Eminent Authors, Inc., but the project failed because such dramatists as Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), *Edward Knoblock (1874–1945), Gouverneur Morris (1876–1953), Gertrude Atherton (1857–1948), and Sir Gilbert Parker (1862–1932) could not adapt to the new medium. Maugham did meet with Lasky and Goldwyn in December 1920, but he evidenced little enthusiasm for becoming a screenwriter. Reportedly, during that visit, he sold a script to one of the studios for $15,000, which he immediately sent to his broker, *Bert Alanson, for investment. Other of Maugham’s fiction and drama converted to the screen by Hollywood studios include *The Circle (under the title *Strictly Unconventional), MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1925 (remade 1930); The Land of Promise (entitled *The Canadian), Paramount 1926, starring Thomas Meighan (1879–1936) and Mona Palma; Sadie Thompson, United Artists, 1928, starring Gloria Swanson (1898– 1983) and Lionel Barrymore (1878–1954)—remade as Rain, United Artists, 1932, starring Joan Crawford (1908–1977) and Walter Huston (1884–1950); further remade as *Miss Sadie Thompson, Columbia Pictures, 1954, starring Rita Hayworth (1918–1987) and Jose Ferrer (1912–1992); *The Constant Wife (under the title *Charming Sinners), Paramount, 1929; *The Sacred Flame, Warner Studios, 1929; *The Letter, Paramount, 1929, starring Jeanne Eagles (1894– 1929)—remade by Warner Brothers, 1940, starring Bette Davis (1908–1989) and *Herbert Marshall (1890–1966); *Our Betters, RKO Radio Pictures, 1933; *The Narrow Corner, Warner Brothers, 1933; *Of Human Bondage, RKO, 1934, starring Leslie Howard (1891–1943) and Bette Davis (1908–1989)—remade Warner Brothers, 1946, starring Paul Henreid (1908–1992) and Eleanor Parker (1922–); remade Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1964, starring Laurence Harvey (1928–1973) and Kim Novak (1933—); *The Painted Veil, Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1934, starring Greta Garbo (1905–1990) and Herbert Marshall (1890– 1966); *The Seventh Sin, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1957; The Sacred Flame (entitled *The Right To Live), Warner Brothers, 1935; Narrow Corner (entitled
HOME AND BEAUTY. A FARCE IN THREE ACTS
91
*Isle of Fury), Warner Brothers, 1936; *‘‘The Vessel of Wrath’’ (retitled *The Beachcomber), Paramount, 1938, starring Charles Laughton (1899– 1962) and Elsa Lanchester (1902–1986); *Home and Beauty (retitled *Too Many Husbands), Columbia, 1940, starring Jean Arthur (1900–1991) and Fred MacMurray (1908–1991)—remade as *Three for the Show, Columbia, 1955, starring Gower Champion (1919–1980) and Betty Grable (1916–1973); *The Moon and Sixpence, United Artists, 1943, starring George Sanders (1906–1972), Herbert Marshall, and Steve Geray (1904–?); *The Hour before the Dawn, Paramount, 1944; *Christmas Holiday, 1944, Universal Pictures; *The Razor’s Edge, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1947, starring Tyrone Power (1913–1958) and Gene Tierney (1920–1991)—remade 1984, Columbia Pictures, 1984, starring Bill Murray (1950—); *Trio (from *‘‘The Verger,’’ *‘‘The Sanatorium,’’ and fragments from *Ashenden), Paramount, 1951, starring Jean Simmons (1929—) and Michael Rennie (1909–?). Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Curran; Halliwell; Jacobs; Menard (1968/1979); Morgan.
‘‘HOME’’ (1925). A short story, published initially in 1925 and included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). In this genealogical labyrinth, †George Meadows the younger and his wife (known as Mrs. George), both in their late forties and the parents of five children, occupy the ancestral farm in the Somersetshire Hills. However, the real master of the family proves to be George’s mother, †Emily Meadows, a seventy-year-old widow. Then enters †Uncle George Meadows, the bachelor brother of the deceased †Tom Meadows (George the younger’s father and Emily’s husband), who had formerly courted Emily Meadows (then Emily Green). When Emily married Tom, some fifty years ago, George the elder had gone away to sea. Now, crippled with rheumatism and with not much time to live, George returns from *China, a half century later, for one last look at the house where he was born. At some time during the first night of his return, Uncle George dies in his sleep in the house where he had been born. Emily evidences relief that George had come home. ‘‘After I married Tom Meadows and George went away, the fact is I was never quite sure that I’d married the right one.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
HOME AND BEAUTY. A FARCE IN THREE ACTS (1923). A play that *Maugham began in late 1917 while recuperating from tuberculosis (in a sanatorium at Nordach-on-Dee, Scotland), completed in 1919, and had published by *Heinemann in 1923. It opened at the Playhouse, London, on 30 August 1919, starring Gladys Cooper, for 253 performances, and at the Booth Theatre, New York, on 8 October 1919, under the title *Too Many Husbands, for 102 performances. It was revived at London in 1950 and again in London in October 1968.
92
HOMOSEXUALITY
Although certainly a bright and amusing piece, Home and Beauty represents Maugham’s reflection on the theme that war, as a form of suffering, cultivates the selfish side of humankind as well as the heroic. That issue he weaves through commentaries upon wartime shortages, the new rich in a new England, and the scarcity and the arrogance of the servant class. The play, set in late November 1918, features †Victoria Cardew-Lowndes, described as ‘‘a dear little thing,’’ who tells her Cockney manicurist, †Miss Dennis, about her two husbands. †William Cardew had been killed in the battle at Ypres, and thus she has married †Frederick Lowndes, William’s best friend. To each, she has born a child. Victoria’s mother, †Mrs. Shuttleworth, believes that her daughter should have married †Leicester Paton, a shipbuilder who has profited from the war. Farcical complications begin when the supposedly dead William Cardew enters the scene, very much alive. Victoria seeks comfort from Paton, while Frederick and William argue over the disposal of their common wife; each wants the other to have her. At that point, the demanding *Mrs. Pogson arrives (she drives her own Ford automobile) to interview for the position of cook. She refuses the position when she learns that Victoria has two husbands. William and Frederick conduct a lottery to determine possession of Victoria, except that Frederick cheats, which occasions a burlesque scene of chasing and choking until the farce and the paper ballot are exposed. After that subsides, Victoria’s servants leave her, and she announces that she will lunch with Paton and attempt to induce a marriage proposal from him. The piece fortunately wends its way toward a conclusion as Frederick and William attempt to engage in the household chores. Into that chaos comes †A. B. Raham, Victoria’s solicitor, who has arranged more divorces than any lawyer in England. With the help of his associate, †Esmeralda Montmorency, a fifty-five-year-old spinster from Shropshire who serves as an intervener in adultery cases (and who resembles a hard-boiled egg), Raham plans a divorce based on cruelty. Finally, with the help of a basket of food sent to Victoria by Paton, Frederick and William close the play by partaking of a good meal and toasting both their liberation and Victoria’s third husband. Bibliography: Barnes; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Innes; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b).
HOMOSEXUALITY. No matter how one wishes to consider this subject—to declare *Maugham an outright homosexual or to point to his homosexual ‘‘tendencies’’—the issue cannot be ignored, either from a biographical or from an artistic perspective. Those scholars who approach Maugham’s life and works reasonably and objectively (Calder and Morgan come most obviously to mind) identify the particulars without moral conclusion or significance. Aside from the two most prominment of his secretary/companions, *Gerald Haxton and *Alan Searle, Maugham associated regularly with known homosexuals and effeminates: *Edward Frederic Benson, *John Ellingham Brooks, Norman Douglas,
HOMOSEXUALITY
93
Ronald Firbank, *Reggie Turner. With Brooks and Benson, Maugham purchased shares of the Villa Cercola on Capri, a refuge for homosexuals following *Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial, and the writer visited there regularly in the summers. Further, several scholars have maintained that Maugham never received the Order of Merit, which he wanted badly, because the Crown accepted reports and rumors of his homosexuality. When *E. M. Forster, a known homosexual, received the award in 1969, the *Criminal Law Amendment Act had been erased from the statutes for two years. Maugham discusses homosexuality directly in two pieces of prose nonfiction (both coming relatively late in his career): the essay on *El Greco (see earlier) in *Don Fernando (1935, 1950) and another piece on Herman Melville in *Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948; see earlier). In the first, Maugham concludes El Greco’s sexual abnormality produced works of art representing tortured fantasy and sinister strangeness. His discussion of Melville focuses upon the novelist’s delight in male beauty and emphasis upon the physical perfection of young men, as opposed to his descriptions of girls or young women. He cites from Melville’s description of the mysterious, dapper, and effeminate Harry Bolton in Redburn (1849), concluding that the character represents one aspect of Melville’s repressed homosexuality. In terms of his own work, Maugham circumvents the issue and leaves much to the imagination of the reader. For example, in the novels, †Bertha Craddock (*Mrs. Craddock [1902]), believed to have been Maugham’s alter ego, admires the hands of her husband, †Edward Craddock. She holds them and feels their intense masculinity; she kisses and squeezes them as visible signs of Edward’s powerful manhood. Bertha’s own muscles become taut whenever she thinks of Edward. The tall and thin †Mildred Rogers in *Of Human Bondage (1915) possesses the narrow hips and chest of a boy; if so, then her relations with †Philip Carey (and others) may well be abnormal. In *The Razor’s Edge (1944), the wayward †Sophie MacDonald (herself thin and flat-chested) introduces the †Narrator (actually, †Maugham) to a †Corsican Sailor and asks him to admire the young man’s physique and to feel his muscles. The Narrator does and ‘‘expressed a proper admiration.’’ Insofar as concerns examples suggesting homosexuality in the short stories, *‘‘Jane’’ (1923) introduces to us the fifty-five-year-old †Jane Fowler, who marries †Gilbert Napier, a twenty-four-year-old architect described as slight, not very tall, fresh, fair, and blooming. Sufficient evidence from his description and actions can be amassed to identify Gilbert as a homosexual with a mother fixation. In *‘‘Red’’ (1921), Maugham describes the twenty-year-old titled character, an American sailor, as ‘‘the most comely thing you ever saw . . . made like a Greek god, broad in the shoulders and thin in the flanks; he was like Apollo, with just that soft roundness which Praxiteles gave him, and that suave, feminine grace which has in it something troubling and mysterious. His skin was dazzling white, milky, like satin; his skin was like a woman’s.’’ See also under CRIMINAL LAW AND AMENDMENT ACT.
94
HONG KONG
Bibliography: Belcham and Price; Calder (1989/1990), (1972/1973); MacKenzie; Menard (1967/1968); Morgan.
HONG KONG. During the first Anglo-Chinese War (1839–1841), the British community fled Canton for the island of Hong Kong, a thirty-mile, largely uninhabited area off the south China coast. The island proved to be separated from the mainland peninsula of Kowloon by a splendid natural harbor. At the end of the war, the Treaty of Nanking ceded Hong Kong to Britain, and it thus began its development as a principal commercial area for Britain in the Far East. In 1860, following the second Anglo-Chinese War (1857–1858), the Convention of Peking ceded to Britain the Kowloon Peninsula. *Maugham visited Hong Kong in January 1920, during a tour of China (which had begun in October 1919), and again in April 1923, as the final stop of a longer tour throughout Southeast Asia. The Crown Colony receives its most comprehensive exposure in the novel *The Painted Veil (1925). Because the Hong Kong government objected to the actual identification of its territory within the novel, most probably because Maugham blended into it an unattractive combination of passion and cholera, the writer quickly changed the setting to the fictitious colony of Tching-Yen. Bibliography: Belcham and Price; Morgan; Webster’s.
‘‘HONOLULU’’ (1921). A short story included in the collection *The Trembling of a Leaf. The †Narrator sets the tone of the piece by declaring at the outset, ‘‘Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu’’ and thus expends five paragraphs describing the incongruity of the place before arriving at his story, which, in turn, concerns incongruity. The reader meets †Winter, an American somewhere between forty and fifty years old and born in Honolulu, who finally enters his father’s department store, but only after having experienced life as a secondrate actor. He continues to pursue an interest in painting. At the Union Saloon, Winter introduces the Narrator to †Captain Butler, who had lost a ship off the California coast and with it his license. He now commands a small, Chineseowned schooner that sails about the islands. Winter and the Narrator go to Butler’s boat, where they meet the captain’s beautiful †Hawaiian girl and †John, his Chinese cook, servant, and the ugliest person the Narrator has ever seen. During the course of an evening spent drinking, the Narrator learns how Butler acquired a calabash that he would not sell for $10,000. He also hears the story of a mate named †Bananas Wheeler and of a former native mistress of Butler who ran away with a former cook and servant of Butler. In the end, we realize that Butler has taken on the ugly John as a precaution against his current mistress’ running off. For, according to Winter, when a Chinese ‘‘lays himself out to please a woman, she can’t resist him.’’ Bibliography: Collected Short Stories. I. East and West; Trembling of a Leaf.
THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN
95
HOPE, LORD JOHN, FIRST BARON GLENDEVON (1912–). The son of Victor Alexander John Hope, eighth earl of Hopetoun and second marquis of Linlithgow (1887–1952), one of the largest landowners in *Scotland and the English viceroy of *India (1936–1943). Lord Linlithgow, who would later become director of the Midland Bank, had refused to recognize the presence of *Gerald Haxton during *Maugham’s visit to India in March 1938. Educated at Eton and Oxford, John Hope served with the Scots Guard in Italy in World War II, after which he gained election (1945) as a Conservative member of Parliament for North Midlothian and in 1959 rose to be minister of works (until 1962). In July 1948, he became the second husband of *Liza Maugham Paravicini, daughter of Maugham and *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome Maugham. The playwright and novelist proposed to settle £20,000 upon his daughter after the wedding. Because of Hope’s social standing and political position, Maugham got on well with his son-in-law until 1954, when the eighty-year-old writer, principally to avoid the taxation on his estate following his death, signed the *Villa Mauresque over to a corporation, with the majority of shares going to Liza. After that, as his physical and mental powers deteriorated (and as *Alan Searle schemed to turn Maugham against his family and the family against Maugham), Maugham erroneously considered himself a guest in the house owned by his daughter and her husband; the writer became outwardly antagonistic against Hope, to whom he referred as ‘‘John Hopeless.’’ Between the middle of 1955 and the summer of 1961, Hope refused to visit at the Villa Mauresque; however, by August 1961, for whatever reasons, relations between Maugham and his sonin-law once more resumed a state of amiability. Bibliography: Morgan; Thorne.
HOPE, JONATHAN CHARLES (1952–). The second child and younger son of *Liza Maugham Hope and *John Hope. Familiarly known as Jeremy. Bibliography: Morgan.
HOPE, JULIAN JOHN SOMERSET (1950–). First child of *Liza Maugham Hope and *Lord John Hope. Anthony Eden (1897–1977) served as the infant’s godfather, while Mrs. Paul Mellon, wife of the Pittsburgh financier, art collector, and philanthropist, stood as his godmother. Bibliography: Morgan.
THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN (1941, 1942). A novel that *Maugham wrote within the space of two months and then published in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday, Doran, and Company; reprinted in New York by Arno Press, 1977. Maugham received a commission for this work from the British Ministry of Information, its purpose being to demonstrate to Americans the effect of the war upon a typical British family. He wrote the piece first as a
96
THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN
screenplay, then as a novel to promote the film. According to the writer, he thoroughly disliked the project, principally because he wanted nothing to do with a work that served as a vehicle for transmitting a message or attempting propaganda. Maugham never allowed the work to be published in England and destroyed the manuscript. However, his ‘‘pain’’ must have been eased considerably when he sold the serial rights to Redbook magazine for $25,000 and the film rights to Paramount Studios for $65,000, with *Christopher Isherwood revising and editing the screenplay. Paramount produced the film in 1944, starring Franchot Tone (1903–1968) and Joan Fontaine (1917–), with Maugham himself on camera for a brief introductory statement. The principal problem with the novel centers upon the typical British family’s being untypical. Its patriarch, †George Henderson, a retired career army officer and country squire, cannot get over the fact that he is retired and, despite his influence among the locals of Graveney, Kent, finds himself too old to get back into the fray. However, his oldest son, †Roger, also a career officer, proves a worthy offspring, moving from the War Office to the staff of the commander in chief and engaging in a thrilling adventure in an escape from France. Roger returns, quite unexpectedly, to the family manor at Graveney Holt with one bullet in his shoulder and another one in his leg. Unfortunately, Roger proves himself less adventuresome with his wife, †May Henderson, the daughter of a naval officer killed in World War I, seemingly preferring the company of his comrades and his older sister, †Jane Foster. Roger’s younger brother, †Jim Henderson, turns out to be a conscientious objector, in love with a German refugee, †Dora Friedberg, the principal transient resident of Graveney Holt, who eventually reveals herself as a Nazi spy. Jim’s only solution to his problem lies initially with murdering Dora and then shooting himself. Supposedly, Maugham fashioned the character of Jim from a young but unnamed relative, the leader of a celebrated group of pacifists of the 1930s known as the ‘‘We will not fight for King or Country,’’ the majority of whom rushed to the colors once England involved itself in the war. The youngest son, thirteen-year-old †Tommy Henderson, remains at Graveney Holt rather than be transported to Canada with the rest of his preparatory school fellows for the duration of the war. In the end, he is killed in a German air raid. The Henderson daughter, Jane, a masculine, horsey woman of thirty-four, wears a rimless monocle in her left eye and prefers life in London to that of the provinces. She becomes a resident of Graveney Holt only after the Germans bomb her apartment building. Her obese and totally dependent husband, †Ian Foster, provides a sprinkling of comic relief. He becomes a security officer who survives Dunkirk but then loses all of his teeth when his transport ship is torpedoed. Treated in a hospital in York, he goes off to *Egypt, equipped with a new set of teeth. May Henderson’s lover, blunt but rugged †Richard Murray, serves as George Henderson’s estate agent. Naturally, he went to school with Roger Henderson and is the latter’s best friend. At the outbreak of war, Murray goes off to France with the Territorials, survives Dunkirk, rises to the rank of
HUNT, ISOBEL VIOLET
97
captain, and proceeds to the campaign in Egypt. A shell explosion blinds him, and although May reconciles herself to remaining with Roger, she feels the need to go off and nurse the invalid Murray. The lower class finds representation in this book in the person of †Nobby Clark, a London mechanic with an ugly and common face, who shares Roger Henderson’s adventure in *France. After their successful escape, Knobby becomes Roger’s messenger at the War Office; his wife, identified only as †Mrs. Clark, with her nine-year old son, †Ernie, and an unnamed two-year-old, †Clark Daughter, eventually vacate London for the supposed safety of Graveney Holt. Simply, the total predictability of these characters dictates the direction and movement of the piece, and everything goes forward as expected. Bibliography: Writer’s Notebook; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Halliwell; Morgan.
‘‘HUMAN ELEMENT, THE’’ (1931). A short story written in 1930 and then published as part of the 1931 collection *Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (1931). On the surface, the piece concerns the evolution of a beautiful, intense, and enthusiastic upper-class English girl from a financially strapped family. †Betty Welldon-Burns had been married to †James Welldon-Burns, a wealthy industrialist and a crashing bore. The marriage went awry, the couple separated, Betty fled to Rhodes, where she bought an estate from a Turkish pasha, and James died. The †Narrator, a writer, hears all of this in Rome from the desperately unhappy †Humphrey Carruthers, himself a distinguished writer of the Bloomsbury-Chekov school, a clerk in the Foreign Office, and a longtime admirer of Betty. Carruthers’ principal problem lies with his being too much of a gentleman to be a writer. At any rate, Carruthers goes to Rhodes to ask Betty to marry him, but then he discovers her liaison with her handsome chauffeur and footman, †Albert, a fine physical specimen who speaks fluent Greek. For Betty, Carruthers proves little more than a variation of her former husband. She demands escape and complete freedom, and Albert proves a worthy companion for her in that state. The real point of the piece, however, lies with the Narrator’s attack upon the so-called writer Humphrey Carruthers. So wrapped up is he with his own false pride and misdirected sense of self-respect that he cannot recognize a good story when he sees one. Instead of writing about Betty Welldon-Burns and his failed relationship with her, he can only relate his tale of woe orally to a fellow writer whom he knows only slighty. ‘‘[H]e [Carruthers] did for one minute look at the situation from the standpoint of the writer.’’ However, to worsen the situation, at least from the Narrator’s view, Carruthers, in the very next minute, claims that ‘‘there’s no story in it.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; First Person Singular; Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1974).
HUNT, ISOBEL VIOLET (1862–1942). English novelist, flamboyant feminist, and strong supporter of the woman suffrage movement, particularly the Women
98
HUNT, ISOBEL VIOLET
Writers’ Suffrage League; known, popularly, as ‘‘Violent’’ Hunt. Born in Durham, the daughter of painter Alfred William Hunt (1830–1896) and novelist Margaret Raine Hunt (1831–1912; pseudonym ‘‘Averil Beaumont’’), she attended Notting Hill High School with the daughters of writer William Morris (1834–1896) and painter Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833–1898), then studied painting at the Kensington Art School. She presented a collection of her early poems to Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) for appraisal. Alfred Hunt determined that his daughter would become a painter, but she inclined too much toward her mother’s influence. Her novels focus on sexual relationships, neurotic heroines, adultery, promiscuity, and prostitution. Among them one needs to consider The Maiden’s Progress (1894), A Hard Woman (1895), The Way of Marriage (1896), White Rose of Weary Leaf (1908), The Celebrity at Home (1904), Sooner or Later (1904), and The Celebrity’s Daughter (1913). Her short stories appeared in such collections as Tales of the Uneasy (1911), The Tiger Skin (1924), and More Tales of the Uneasy (1925). Hunt’s first affair came in 1884 at age eighteen with the fifty-one-year-old painter George Boughton, followed by a six-year (1892–1898) companionship with Oswald Crawfurd, fifty-six-year-old former consular official, chairman of the London publishing firm of Chapman and Hall, and the husband of an invalid. Reportedly, she came away from that affair with a severe case of syphilis. Hunt maintained a fairly long (1908–1918) affair with the married fiction writer and essayist Ford Madox Ford (formerly Ford Hermann Hueffer; 1873–1939), seven years her junior, and she became heavily involved in his literary journal, the English Review (1908–1923). In 1902, she and her mother took up residence in South Lodge, London, where they hosted fashionable tea and garden parties. The most prominent of her literary friends included *Henry James (1843–1916), *H. G. Wells (1966–1946), Ezra Pound (1885–1972), *Rebecca West (1892– 1983), and Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). Hunt died in almost complete isolation in South Lodge in the middle of a German air raid. According to her own diary, the twenty-six-year-old Violet Hunt met *Maugham (then forty-one) in early January 1903 (between her Crawfurd and Ford periods), probably as a result of his association with *The Venture. They began an affair that lasted only briefly, until 1905 perhaps, but the two continued on friendly terms and maintained regular correspondence. Maugham (almost spitefully, it appears) dedicated his travel book on *Spain, *The Land of the Blessed Virgin (1905) to Hunt, and she reciprocated (with an equal dose of spite) by dedicating her novel, White Rose of Weary Leaf (1908) to Maugham. Hunt most likely stood as the model for †Rose Waterford, the cynical novelist in *Cakes and Ale (1930), who, despite her masculine intelligence and feminine perversity, extends kindness toward young †William Ashenden. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); DNB; Drabble; Morgan; Shattock.
I IBSEN, HENRIK JOHAN (1828–1906). Norwegian playwright and poet. Born in Skien, Norway, the son of a business speculator, Ibsen worked (1843–1850) as a chemist’s assistant at Grimstad. The theaters rejected his first play, Catilina (1850), after which he worked as a journalist (1850–1852) and then received a post at the Norwegian theater in Bergen managed by Ole Borneman Bull (1810– 1880), for which he wrote five conventional romantic dramas. His first major play, Konsemberne (The Pretenders, 1857), combined history with psychology. Also in 1857, he became the artistic director of the National Theatre at Kristiana (Oslo); after it went into bankruptcy, Ibsen, angry at the apathy of the Norwegian government over the struggle between Denmark and Germany, went into voluntary exile (1864–1892) in Rome, Dresden, and Munich. His international reputation began with two dramatic poems, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), followed by what he believed to have been his masterpiece and his last historical drama, Kejser og Galilaer (Emperor and Galilean, 1873). However, the strength of that reputation remains with his social plays: Et Dukkehjem (A Doll’s House, 1879), the controversial Gengangere (Ghosts, 1881), and En Folkefiende (An Enemy of the People, 1882). His later dramatic pieces evidence his reliance upon symbolism: Vildanden (The Wild Duck, 1884), Rosmersholm (1886), and Bygmester Solness (The Master Builder, 1892). Another of his most noted pieces, Hedda Gabler (1890), represents during this period a solitary focus upon realism. Ibsen suffered a stroke in 1900, which effectively ended his literary career. His principal contribution was to bring about a revolution in world drama that gave birth and life to such disciples as Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), *George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Eugene Brieux (1858–1932), and Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946). During the year and one-half (1890–1892) that young *Maugham spent at
100
‘‘IN A STRANGE LAND’’
Heidelberg, he attended, almost nightly, performances of plays by Ibsen and his contemporaries, Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928) and Henry Franc¸ois Becque (1837–1899), at avant-garde theaters there. At Munich, he even managed to catch a glimpse of the aged Ibsen at the Maximilianerhof, drinking beer and reading a newspaper. More important, however, Maugham came away from *Germany and Ibsen’s plays with a keen sense of the need for daring and experimentation upon the English stage. His own early experiments while still a medical student at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, the most obvious being *Marriages Are Made in Heaven (written 1896, produced 1902), demonstrated the influence of Ibsen, with characters suffering from fatal diseases, concealing guilty secrets, carrying soiled hereditary baggage, attacking idealism, and generally flaunting social conventions. Further, common critical reaction to *The Bread Winner (1930) emphasizes its close parallels with A Doll’s House, only in Maugham’s play the bored husband deserts his arty wife and his parasitic children. Of course, in *The Constant Wife (1926), Maugham’s †Constance Middleton follows Ibsen’s Nora Helmer (A Doll’s House) down the road to some form of economic and social liberation. Finally, in the novel *Theatre (1937), †Julia Lambert Gosselyn first met her husband, the handsome actor/ manager †Michael Gosselyn, when he played Oswald Alving and she the maid Regina in Ghosts. Bibliography: Cordell; Curtis (1974/1977); Fielden (1961); Freedley and Reeves; Gassner and Quinn; Hartnoll; Morgan.
‘‘IN A STRANGE LAND’’ (1924). A short story published initially in 1924, then included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). In what amounts to essentially little more than a character sketch, *Maugham presents a variation on one of his favorite social themes: the strict conventions and the traditions of Edwardian society, particularly for those persons who recognized and accepted their stations in the system of life. Thus, even after having spent the past thirty years in an obscure town in Asia Minor, †Signora Niccolini, an Englishwoman (ne´e Parker), formerly in the service of the late †Lord Ormskirk, maintains a hotel and proves a model of decorum, particularly when she brings the †Narrator a hot water bottle. Her husband and Lord Ormskirk’s former chef, †Signor Niccolini, has been dead for fifteen years; she has raised the two sons of Niccolini and his first wife, a Greek woman, training the boys thoroughly and lovingly to take over the hotel after their stepmother’s demise. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans; Curtis (1974).
INDIA. During most of *Maugham’s life, India existed as a principal part of the British Empire. By 1887, those parts of the subcontinent not under direct British control functioned as protected states under native rulers, with varying
INDIA
101
degrees of dependence upon the London ministry and the East India Company. Between 1858 and 1885, India had experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth, highlighted by the rise of such metropolitan centers as Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, as well as a general increase in population. Further, the British took significant steps to create a national integrated economy, comprehensive networks of transportation and communication, and a common system of English-language education, to include university level. The beginning of opposition to British rule and the drive toward eventual independence began as early as 1885, with the organization of the Indian National Congress. Following World War I, bitter struggles occurred between between Conservative Britons and Indian nationalists, marked by the emergence of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), the venerated moral teacher and reformer who envisioned an India free from both the caste system and the greed brought on by the drive for materialism. An act of 1935 separated Burma and Aden from India and divided the country into eleven provinces, each under control of a governor. Actual independence came in 1947, with the creation of the sovereign states of India and Pakistan. Maugham had placed India low on his travel and artistic priorities, principally because he considered the people and places of the subcontinent to be the imaginative property of *Rudyard Kipling. However, in searching for some form of higher principle or order to guide and rule his life, Maugham had come across Buddhist nonattachment, which he treated initially and quickly in his 1932 novel, *The Narrow Corner. †George P. Frith sees Brahma as the only reasonable religion that a person can unquestionably embrace, while †Dr. Saunders confesses interest in the mystical experience and inclines steadily toward Buddhism. In the narrative of Maugham’s travels through Burma, Siam, and Indochina, *The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930), Maugham discussed the philosophy of Buddha and the attraction of the belief in the transmigration of souls. Further, Maugham owned a copy of The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramhansa Yogananda, in which the author inscribed, ‘‘To Somerset Maugham, author of *‘The Razor’s Edge,’ which has done so much good in the world by spreading the seeds of India’s teachings.’’ Five years later, prior to the actual writing of The Razor’s Edge, Maugham felt a need to see India and Buddhism for himself, particularly the southern states under native rule, where English influence would be the least. Thus, in January 1938, Maugham and *Gerald Haxton arrived in Bombay, armed with letters of introduction from the Aga Khan, his neighbor on the French Riviera, to various maharajas. He planned a three-month tour. Remaining in Bombay for ten days, he then set off for the Portuguese Catholic state of Goa, where, to his dismay, he met a Catholic priest whose Brahmin ancestors had been converted from their religion. In Madura, he visited the large seventeenth-century temple built to the goddess Siva, where he found priests and their pupils, as well as homeless poor, praying and setting forth burnt offerings. From Madras, Maugham traveled by car to Tiruvannamalai, at the foot of the sacred mountain
102
INDOCHINA
of Arunachala. There he met a holy man, Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi (d.1950), a strict vegetarian whose meditations, his disciples claimed, produced spiritual illumination. However, the writer fainted as he waited to be presented to the holy man, and the interview did not achieve the expected results. Nonetheless, Maugham found there an American ex-sailor from Long Beach, California, named Guy Hague, who had joined the Bhagavan to find peace and spiritual serenity. Hague stands as the primary candidate for the model of †Lawrence Darrell in The Razor’s Edge, while the Bhagavan undoubtedly emerged in the novel as the †Swami who meets Larry on the ship from Alexandria to Bombay. Hyderabad proved Maugham’s next stop, where he met the finance minister, Sir Akbar Hydari, who thought that the writer had come to shoot tigers. When the writer asked to meet with scholars and religious teachers, Hydari supplied another holy man who merely repeated everything that Maugham had already heard. From Hyderabad to Bidar, Maugham came across a healer, a former contractor in a dirty white turban, a swami who practiced aestheticism, and fakirs in a Moslem cemetery putting skewers through their eyes and cheeks. At Nagpur, he lunched with the prince and princess of Berar, the prince telling him that the difference between the Yacht Club at Bombay and the Bengal Club at Calcutta depended upon the former’s allowing dogs on the premises, while the latter did not. From there, Maugham and Haxton took in Calcutta, Banaras, Agra, the Taj Mahal, New Delhi, and finally, at the end of March, back in Bombay. Although Maugham did indeed learn something about India, its religion, and its holy men, he came away with a poor impression of the English there, particularly their racism and provincialism. A second visit planned for the autumn of 1939 to gather still more material on India had to be canceled because of World War II. In a 1959 biography of Maugham, New York University English professor *Karl G. Pfeiffer maintained that Maugham actually had an interview with Gandhi. However, Maugham angrily denied that such an event had occurred. Bibliography: Belcham and Price; Calder (1989/1990), (1972/1973); Crystal; Morgan; Pfeiffer; Webster’s.
INDOCHINA During *Maugham’s day and particularly between the two world wars, Indochina included the principal kingdoms of Annam, Burma, Cambodia (Kampuchea), Laos, Malaya, Siam (Thailand), and Vietnam, the area controlled essentially by the French and the British. As in the present, the cultures of those areas reflected proximity with China and India. In late 1922, Maugham and *Gerald Haxton traveled to Ceylon, then took a boat from Colombo to Rangoon. On board he met a man who mentioned Kengtung, a Burmese market village near the Tibetan border, where gathered natives of at least six countries and fifty tribes. The man added that he would rather live there than anywhere else in the world. Maugham and Haxton set out for Kengtung as soon as they arrived in Rangoon in November. Twenty-six days
‘‘AN IRISH GENTLEMAN’’
103
later, they arrived, and Maugham saw the village as an ideal place where one could read and think. They then crossed the border into Siam. At Bangkok, Maugham caught malaria and had to pause until his 105-degree temperature returned to normal. Upon recovering, he and Haxton traveled to Pnompenh, Saigon, Hue, Haiphong, *Hong Kong, and Shanghai. The principal fruits of Maugham’s travel labors came in 1930 with the detailed narrative, The Gentleman in the Parlour. Bibliography: Morgan; Webster’s.
‘‘INSIDE STORY OF THE COLLAPSE OF FRANCE’’ (1940). An insignificant essay published in Redbook magazine for October 1940. As with the longer *France at War (March 1940), this piece continued (and concluded) the writer’s World War II propaganda efforts on behalf of the British Ministry of Information. Bibliography: Morgan; Stott (1973).
INTRODUCTION TO MODERN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE (1943). The complete title, Great Modern Reading: W. Somerset Maugham’s Introduction to Modern English and American Literature. Published in New York by Doubleday and Company. Prefatory essays in which *Maugham discusses (not always from a complimentary point of view) the works of such writers and contemporaries as *Henry James (1843–1916), James Joyce (1882– 1941), and William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). Bibliography: Morgan; Stott (1973).
‘‘AN IRISH GENTLEMAN’’ (1904). A short story, published in The Strand (1904) magazine. †Robert O’Donnel, a handsome Irish teacher of Latin, gambler, and writer for booksellers, seeks artistic emotion. He arrives in the principality of Wartburg Hochstein with a copy of Virgil in one pocket, Byron’s Childe Harold in the other, his last £50, and his journal notebook. In a gesture of pure chivalry, he saves the life of the †Princess Mary by stopping her runaway horse. O’Donnel represents *Maugham’s ideal man: the perfect combination of the serious reader, traveler, and writer. He refuses a reward of £50 for his heroism offered by the tyrant †King John-Adolphus of Wartburg Hochstein, telling the sovereign’s emissary, †Count Peter von Graban, to donate that sum, plus O’Donnel’s own (and last) fifty pounds, to the Princess’ favorite charity. He then invites John-Adolphus to dinner at his inn, afterward pawning his ring to pay the bill. However, upon trying to leave the country, he is arrested at the border and taken to the King’s dungeon. John-Adolphus appears wearing O’Donnel’s ring, which he exchanges with the prisoner for one of his own— worth £200. At the end of a highly jocular dinner, all three become friends. Princess Mary asks the King if O’Donnel is a mountebank or a hero. ‘‘English
104
IRVING, ETHEL
and Irish, they’re all mad,’’ answers the King; ‘‘that’s why they conquer the world.’’ Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories; Curtis.
IRVING, ETHEL (1869–1963). English actress. She played the title role of †Lady Frederick Berolles in *Maugham’s first stage hit, *Lady Frederick, when it opened in London on 26 October 1907 at the Royal Court Theatre. For the 250th performance at the Criterion Theatre on 3 June 1908, each member of the audience received a copy of a souvenir portrait of Ethel Irving by F. Howard Michael. Irving repeated the role in the 1913 revival. Further, she served as a key piece of the mosaic that comprised the fictional actress †Julia Lambert Gosselyn in Maugham’s novel *Theatre (1937). Bibliography: Barnes; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
ISHERWOOD, CHRISTOPHER WILLIAM BRADSHAW (1904–1986). English novelist, poet, and essayist. Born in Disley, Cheshire, the son of an army captain killed in World War I, Isherwood entered the literary world when he met Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–1973) at preparatory school and then Edward Falaise Upward (1903–?) at Repton and Cambridge University. In fiction, he came initially under the influence of *E. M. Forster and *Virginia Woolf and produced All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932). His own experiences—particularly the period 1929–1933, when he lived in the decadence of postslump and pre-Hitler Berlin as an English tutor—come forth in Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). In the mid-1930s he collaborated with Auden in a series of politically inspired prose-verse plays, the most noted being The Ascent of F6 (1936; produced 1937). Isherwood then proceeded to an autobiographical novel, Lions and Shadows (1938), which included experiences with such literati as Auden, Stephen Spender (1909–1995), Vernon Phillips Watkins (1906–1967), and Upward. In *Hollywood, with help from *Gerald Heard (1889–1971) and Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), he became interested in Hindu philosophy and edited and translated a number of the Hindu classics. While in the United States (he became an American citizen in 1946), he also wrote the novels Prater Violet (1945), The World in the Evening (1954), Down There on a Visit (1962), A Single Man (1964), and Meeting by the River (1967), the last of which attempts both to explicate and transmit Hindu philosophy. Christopher and His Kind (1976) relates his homosexual activities when a young man. *Maugham and Isherwood first met, most probably, in October 1938 in London at one of *Sybil Colefax’s dinner parties. The young writer felt intimidated by Maugham’s presence, but the two eventually became friends during the war when Maugham visited California. He thought Isherwood a delightful person, although one whom no one could really get to know. In 1941, when Warner Brothers bought Maugham’s novel *Up at the Villa (1941) for $30,000, the
ITALY
105
studio assigned Isherwood to write the screenplay, a task made difficult because of the need to satisfy the censors. Isherwood had to admit that he wrote a bad script from an equally bad story. Isherwood, as well as does *Gerald Heard, forms part of the composite model for †Lawrence Darrell in *The Razor’s Edge (1944), particularly those traits that led to Isherwood’s pacifism and then to his interest in the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. From his point of view, Isherwood considered the piece a successful religious novel. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990), (1972/1973); Curtis (1977); DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
ISLE OF FURY (1936). The second of two motion pictures based on the novel *The Narrow Corner (1932); produced by Warner Brothers. For the first film (1933), see under NARROW CORNER. ITALY. The first of *Maugham’s frequent visits to Italy came about in the spring of 1894 during the Easter holiday from the medical school at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London. He spent six weeks there, touring Genoa, Pisa, Florence (where he studied Italian and Dante), Venice, Verona, and Milan. He returned in September 1907, going to Sicily to visit the Greek temples and returning (quickly, for the opening of *Lady Frederick in late October) by way of Palermo and Naples. He went again during September–October 1908, when he spent most of his time composing a new play, *Penelope (1909). Almost a year later, in April 1909, the writer spent time at Lake Como and in Florence, where he worked on another play, *Smith (1909), and vacationed there again the next year. In July 1915, Maugham obtained a leave from his ambulance unit in *France so that he might take *Syrie Bernardo Wellcome to Rome, where she could give birth to their expectant child without anyone’s knowing about the event. Here he managed to work on still another play, *Our Betters (1917). When the time neared for the birth, he summoned Syrie’s mother, departed for a short holiday on *Capri to swim with his *homosexual friends, and then returned in time for the birth of their daughter, Liza, on 1 September. Further visits to Italy occurred in April 1922 and April 1938, both to Florence, and in September–October 1953 to visit *Max Beerbohm, who lived outside Rapallo. In May 1954, the eighty-year-old Maugham went to Venice and then on to Abano, where he sought and received relief for his rheumatism. On his return to the *Villa Mauresque from Paris in April 1956, he stopped outside Florence for what proved to be a final visit with another oldtime friend, the ninety-two-year-old Bernard Berenson (1875–1959). A year later, after a recurrence of a kidney inflammation, he and *Alan Searle set out (May 1957) for Italy and Germany; he returned in April 1959, May 1960 (to Venice), June 1961 (again Venice, to rest), May 1963 (with Alan Searle), and finally in April 1964 (again in the company of Searle).
106
ITALY
In his longer fiction, Maugham failed to take full advantage of his numerous journeys to Italy. Instead of capturing the animation of the present, he chose to concern himself with history. He wrote about what he had seen on the pages of library books rather than through his own sharp eyes and mind. For instance, his second novel, *The Making of a Saint (1898), set in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century, arises from the Florentine Histories (Storie Fiorentine, 1520– 1525) of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) and the insurrection at Forli in 1487. Rather than anything that Maugham had seen in Italy, he based his material on works on medieval Italy that he read at the British Museum and then filtered through his own exercise in historical reconstruction. Almost a half century later, Maugham again turned his fictional eye to Renaissance Italy, this time featuring the guileful and diplomatic †Machiavelli rather than merely borrowing from him. In *Then and Now (1946), which he had begun in America during the war, he expands an isolated incident in the Florentine’s career to demonstrate, ironically and comically, how the Florentine, a self-proclaimed lover and master diplomat, can be bested in love and diplomacy by †Caesar Borgia, a person of even greater guile and cunning. Each novel has its particular moments, particularly in and near a woman’s bedroom, but neither ever rises to the level of quality of his first-rate novels, plays, and stories. Certainly, one can find bits and pieces of Italy in such works as *Mrs Craddock, (1902), *The Explorer (1907), *The Magician, and *Up at the Villa (1941), but those exist only as quick flashes to be overcome by larger, stronger, and more important contexts and images. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
J JACK STRAW: A FARCE IN THREE ACTS (1912). A play, written within the space of two weeks and produced at the Vaudeville Theatre, the Strand, London, on 26 March 1908. *Charles Henry Hawtrey (1858– 1923) starred in the title role, and the production ran for 321 performances (closing only because Hawtrey underwent an attack of appendicitis). The play was produced in New York in 1908 for 112 performances, then revived in London in 1923 for some ninety performances. *William Heinemann published the work in London in 1912, and it appeared that same year in Chicago under the imprint of Dramatic Publishing. Paramount Studios, through Famous Players-Lasky, produced a film version in 1920, directed by Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959). In October 1917, while in Petrograd, Russia, as British agent, *Maugham attended a Russian production of Jack Straw that, according to the theater program, had been translated from the English of ‘‘Mum.’’ Naturally, the piece focuses upon the title character, †Jack Straw, at the outset a waiter at the Grand Babylon Hotel. †Ambrose Holland, a former traveling actor who had met Straw in the United States, discusses the waiter’s romantic and varied background with †Lady Wanley, a handsome widow of uncertain age and the mother of two sons. Straw had been an actor, sailor, bartender, railroad engineer, gold miner, and ranch hand. In reality, Straw is the †Archduke Sebastion, godson of the †Emperor of Pomerania, who left the kingdom as the result of a minor family spat, but the majority of characters must wait until nearly the end of the play to uncover that fact. The plot assumes shape in the form of the pretentious Parker-Jennings family: †Robert, the father, a common and self-assertive hardware magnate from Brixton, has trodden the rough path to success and currently finds himself worth £80,000 per year. His wife, †Maria, claims her true name to be Marion; also from Brixton, she flaunts her new
108
JAMES, HENRY
money in a vulgar manner and seeks a foreign nobleman to marry her daughter. The daughter, †Ethel, appears charming and pretty, while †Vincent, the son, aggressively displays his Oxford education. When, at the Grand Babylon, the Parker-Jennings snub Lady Wanley, the latter plots revenge by asking the waiter Straw to disguise himself as a foreign noble (which, of course, he really is) and to pursue the hand of Ethel Parker-Jennings. The Parker-Jennings then entertain Sebastion/Straw at the country estate in Cheshire that they have leased from Lady Wanley. Straw quickly and actually falls in love with Ethel, the Parker-Jennings push for marriage, and Ambrose Holland tells the hosts and parents that their foreign noble is really a hotel waiter. However, the Parker-Jennings must continue the charade for the sake of their garden party and guests. After the party, which represents an exercise in the maintenance of false and superficial Edwardian social codes, Holland, Lady Wanley, and the Parker-Jennings attempt to convince Straw to leave, but he refuses. He asks Ethel to marry him, but she refuses and claims engagement to the insignificant and penniless †Lord Ned Serlo. The piece finally concludes with the entrance of †Count Adrian von Bremer, the Pomeranian ambassador, who reveals the true identity of the hotel waiter as the Archduke Sebastion. At that point, Ethel Parker-Jennings agrees to marry Jack Straw. Reviewers and critical commentators have maintained that the dramatic success of Jack Straw came not from Maugham’s pen but from Charles Hawtrey’s performance in the title role. At best, the piece exists as a fine example of diverting entertainment. Essentially, however, Maugham owed a considerable debt to the traditions of comic opera, the subtle love comedies of Pierre Marivaux (1688–1763), and to the character comedy of Molie`re [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673). In Marivaux’s pieces, especially, pleasant young people fall in love with each other at first sight, but before their eventual union, they must proceed through a labyrinth (most often constructed by others) of modesty, pride, fear, bad faith, and even ignorance. Bibliography: Collected Plays. I; Barnes; Burt; Curtis (1974); Dottin (1937); Gassner and Quinn; Kruschwitz (1939–1940b); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan; Sutton.
JAMES, HENRY (1843–1916). *Maugham did not come into actual contact with the American-born James until sometime in 1904 or 1905. We know that Maugham visited James in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 1910, shortly after the death of the latter’s philosopher/brother, William. Then in 1911 the two sat next to each other at a matinee of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904), produced by the London experimental theater group, the Stage Society Incorporated (founded 1899). By that time, James had written in excess of twenty novels and novellas, more than fifty short stories, travel sketches, essays, and four plays for the English stage. He had settled in Europe in 1875, would become a British subject in 1915, and would receive the Order of Merit the following year. On the surface, it would appear that James’s American birth
‘‘JANE’’
109
and the thirty-year difference in their ages would create a chasm between Maugham and him. However, wider issues stood between the two, and they never managed to achieve a friendly relationship. Essentially, Maugham thought that his own firsthand view of life, focusing on specific persons as well as their specific experiences, clashed hard with James’s subtle and often obscure perceptions of human thought and existence. In a word, he viewed James’s fiction as a threat to realism. Further, he thought James, as a person, overly pompous—a quality to which Maugham himself proved no stranger. No matter what the real problems, Maugham, particularly in his written criticism, had few kind words for James, reminding one of William Hazlitt’s attacks upon such of his contemporaries as Robert Southey and Charles Lamb during the early nineteenth century. At one point he compared the older man with a mountain climber who, simply to walk up the 206-foot-high Primrose Hill, equipped himself with all of the paraphernalia necessary to scale the 29,028-foot Mount Everest. On another occasion, he maintained that James’s fictional characters ‘‘have neither bowels nor sexual organs.’’ In yet another context, he viewed James’s stories and novels as ‘‘cobwebs which a spider may spin in the attic of some old house, intricate, delicate and even beautiful, but which at any moment the housemaid’s broom with brutal common sense may sweep away.’’ In *Cakes and Ale (1930), †Willie Ashenden tells †Alroy Kear that James ‘‘had turned his back on one of the great events of the world’s history, the rise of the United States, in order to report tittle-tattle at tea parties in English country houses.’’ Further, one need only go through the list of Maugham’s fictional and dramatic expatriate social climbers and snobs, male as well as female, headed by †Lady Pearl Grayston in *Our Betters (1923) and †Elliott Templeton in *The Razor’s Edge (1944), to find bits and pieces of Henry James. Simply, the two writers had nothing in common with each other; perhaps only envy kept Maugham’s mouth open and his pen wet. One must always be aware that serious James scholars have never looked seriously upon Maugham, his work, or his critical remarks about their subject. Bibliography: Books and You; Some Novelists I Have Known; Cordell; Curtis (1974/ 1977); DNB; Drabble; Hartnoll; Morgan; Mustanoja.
‘‘JANE’’ (1923). A short story published initially in 1923 and included in the collection *Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (1931). In 1947 *S. N. Behrman’s dramatic adaptation of the story opened in London; he then produced the piece in New York in February 1952, and it ran for 102 performances. The main character in the play, Willie Tower, represents a clear portrait of *Maugham. On the most obvious level, ‘‘Jane’’ may be classified as yet another of Maugham’s exercises about a middle-aged woman who marries a younger man. From another view (that one expressed by Cyril Connolly on BBC radio in 1970), a reader might see the piece as the story of a *homosexual young man
110
JAPANESE MAUGHAM SOCIETY
with a mother fixation. At any rate, the †Narrator, a friend of †Marion Tower, meets †Jane Fowler, her plain, old-fashioned, and not very attractive sister-inlaw. Jane marries †Gilbert Napier, twenty-seven years her junior, an extremely young and handsome architect, apparently deeply in love with her. The union proves successful until Jane becomes bored with her husband’s youthful and inane conversation; he does little else but design clothes for her. She then deserts him for an older man, †Sir Reginald Frobisher. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; First Person Singular; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Hartnoll.
JAPANESE MAUGHAM SOCIETY. In November 1959, a *Maugham exhibit on loan from Stanford University opened at the Maruzen Bookstore, the largest such establishment in Tokyo, and the eighty-five-year-old writer received an invitation to attend. Prior to his arrival, he learned of the existence of a Japanese Maugham Society, with a membership of twelve hundred headed by a Tokyo English professor, Mutsuo Tanaka. The organization attested to Maugham’s popularity in Japan; it held annual meetings where members read (and later published) scholarly papers on their revered subject. Tanaka had written to *Alan Searle, suggesting that Maugham meet the emperor and receive a decoration, but both Maugham and his secretary/companion refused the offer. Upon the day of departure, Professor Tanaka reportedly told Maugham that his name would remain immortal in Japan. Bibliography: Morgan.
JEWS. There exists, in the midst of various piles of critical and biographical studies of *Maugham, a mild debate about whether the writer was or was not anti-Semitic. Part of the problem arose from the writer’s general indifference to his friends’ political or religious views. For example, prior to World War II, he retained a personal and professional relationship with his wealthy neighbor on the Riviera, the French fascist and anti-Semitic Corsican Horace de Carbuccia, who, during the 1920s and 1930s, supervised the translations and productions of Maugham’s plays in *France. Further, as a writer of drama and fiction who tended to recycle themes, plots, and characters, he relied on stereotypes. In *Lady Frederick (1907), for instance, the polished and well-groomed †Captain Montgomerie, in love with †Lady Frederick Berolles, holds the debts of Lady Frederick and her brother, †Sir Gerald O’Mara. Montgomerie turns out to be the son of †Aaron Levitski, a Jewish moneylender. However, Maugham also proved quick and eager to turn the traditional tables. In the short story *‘‘Lady Habart’’ (1900), the titled character bemoans her choice of moneylenders: ‘‘I wish I’d gone to a Jew instead of a Christian. Christians always swindle one more.’’ Later, prior to introducing the moneylender, †Captain Smithson, Maugham writes, ‘‘Once upon a time money-lenders were unwashed Hebrews in shabby clothes, malodorous, speaking English with an abominable accent. . . .
JONES, ETHELWYN SYLVIA
111
But Captain Smithson of the Militia was a gentleman to the tips of his fingers.’’ In another story, *‘‘The Fortunate Painter’’ (1906), the Jewish art dealer †Monsieur Leir laments the fact that the picture trade is no place for an honest man now. . . . It was all very well in the old days, when we had it in our own hands. We drove hard bargains, but it was all aboveboard. But now the Christians have taken to it, there’s a good deal too much hocuspocus.
In his travel narrative *The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930), Maugham’s narrator comments upon an American Jew, Elfenbein, ‘‘the kind of Jew who made you understand the pogrom.’’ In the play *Smith (1909), the young †Cynthia Russell has married †Otto Rosenberg, a German Jew considerably older than she, a naturalized British citizen and a member of the Stock Exchange. Each of his sisters, †Pom-Pom and †Rachel Rosenberg, has an income of £30,000. Finally, during World War II, the Nazi propaganda machine published a booklet under the title A Contribution on Interpreting School Literature. It contained an article by one Hans Kruschwitz, ‘‘The Race Question in W. S. Maugham’s The Alien Corn,’’ in which the writer argued that Maugham’s 1931 story supported the thesis of racial barriers being natural and that Jews will always remain aliens, no matter in what countries they settle. Maugham’s choice of a Jew as the main character proved most unfortunate, for the story concerns the inability of the untalented artist to survive, no matter what his racial or ethnic background. One also needs to consider Maugham’s relationship with Jews outside his fiction and drama. In 1940, for instance, he played a key role in securing the release from internment by the German army of the exiled German novelist and satirist Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958), who eventually came to the United States. Then, of course, there stand the examples of his close friendships and relationships with such Jews as *S. N. Behrman, *Jerome Weidman, *Jerome Zipkin, and *Bertram Alanson—the last being the stockbroker responsible for Maugham’s own personal fortune. He opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine but continued to express the cliche´ that ‘‘some of my best friends, both in England and America, are Jews.’’ Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Robin Maugham (1978); Morgan.
JONES, ETHELWYN SYLVIA (1883–1948). Known as Sue, the second daughter of playwright Henry Arthur Jones (1851–1929). An actress, she began her career at age fifteen or sixteen in one of her father’s plays, The Manoeuvres of Jane (1898), and later entered the Shakespeare company of Herbert Draper Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917). Her career on the stage proved uninspiring, and she spent most of it as an understudy or in small parts in the provinces. In 1902 she married producer Montague Vivian Leveaux, but the union ended in divorce. She married again in 1913, her husband being the construction engineer and
112
‘‘THE JUDGMENT SEAT’’
politician Angus McDonnell (1881–1966), the sixth earl of Antrim. In 1914 she retired from the stage and spent the remainder of her life as the wife of a country squire. *Maugham first met the promiscuous Sue Jones in the summer of 1906 at an afternoon party at Merton Abbey, the home of *Mrs. G. W. Steevens. He immediately fell in love with her, even proposed marriage to her in Chicago in late 1913 (which she rejected); in the end, he settled for an affair that lasted some eight years. Indeed, she proved to have been the one true female love in the writer’s entire life. Maugham placed Jones in the role of †Peyton, the neat parlormaid, in his 1909 production of *Penelope. Most important in the relationship was the evolution of Sue Jones into the character of †Rosie Driffield in *Cakes and Ale (1930); Rosie proved to have been the most serious and the most realistic of all Maugham’s stage and fictional portrayals. In addition, Gerald Kelley’s actual portrait of her, Mrs. L. in White, 1907, appears in Maugham’s novel as that of Rose Driffield, with a white silk dress and a black velvet bow in her hair. Bibliography: ‘‘Looking Back’’; Writer’s Notebook; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Drabble; Hartnoll; Kanin; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
‘‘THE JUDGMENT SEAT’’ (1934). A short story (more like a parable), initially published in 1934 and included in the collection *The Cosmopolitans (1936). Three rigidly moral people have suffered terribly because of their morality. Specifically, †John and †Ruth controlled their passion for each other because of John’s wife, †Mary. On the surface, Ruth devotes herself to the sick and the poor, John functions as a perfect Christian and gentleman, and Mary remains a faithful wife. However, John really hates Mary, Mary really despises John, and the charitable Ruth becomes intolerant and vindictive. Then, on the day of judgment, God sentences the three of them neither to heaven nor to hell but to oblivion. After God blows lightly and annihilates them, he engages in an argument with a †Philosopher over good and evil, concluding that he has just demonstrated the combination of his almighty power with his almighty goodness. Essentially, *Maugham challenges the view that the resistance to temptation adds nobility to the human character. Virtue, when carried to extreme, becomes a vice. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974).
K KANIN, GARSON (1912–). American actor, director, producer, novelist, and playwright. Born in Rochester, New York, Kanin attended (1932–1933) the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and then spent three years on the Broadway stage (1933–1936). His most noted original stage plays include Born Yesterday (1946), a farce focusing on wartime Washington, D.C., and Smile of the World (1949), concerning a brilliant young attorney who becomes a Supreme Court justice and turns into a pompous reactionary. Among his novels one should note Do Re Mi (1955), the story of four ex-gangsters in the juke box business; Blow Up a Storm (1959), about black–white antagonism in the world of jazz; A Thousand Summers (1973); A Hell of an Actor (1977); and Moviola (1979). Kanin and his wife, actress *Ruth Gordon, had known *Maugham since the late 1930s. The couple numbered among Maugham’s confidants, and he fed Kanin stories and anecdotes about such subjects as the titles of his books, writing plays, money, his love life, his marriage, and his daughter. In 1966, following Maugham’s death, Kanin published his memoir, Remembering Mr. Maugham, an amusing and sympathetic account of his relationship with his subject but excluding any references or inferences to Maugham’s *homosexuality. Those who appreciated Kanin’s efforts incorporated his stories into their own biographies and critical analyses, likening Kanin to Samuel Johnson’s James Boswell, running after the great master and recording his very word. His detractors saw the memoir as another of Kanin’s exercises in name-dropping, claiming that the purpose of the work was to advance Kanin’s own image as the more interesting figure of the two. On 22–27 July 1966 Remembering Mr. Maugham took to the Broadway stage of the Mark Tapper Forum for the Center Group Theatre. According to Kanin’s
114
KELLY, SIR GERALD FESTUS
wife, Ruth Gordon, ‘‘Garson Kanin remembers and Dennis King, his coproducer, becomes Mr. Maugham.’’ Each segment was introduced by a guest artist: Jack Lemmon, Edward G. Robinson, Jean Simmons, Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Diahann Carroll, Rosiland Russell, and Ruth Gordon. Bibliography: Calder; Curtis (1977); Hart; Kanin; Morgan.
KELLY, SIR GERALD FESTUS (1879–1972). English painter. Born in London, the son of the vicar of Camberwell and his wealthy wife, Kelly received his formal education at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1901, he went to Paris to study art, and during World War I, he served as a British intelligence agent in *Spain. Back in England, he became an artist of the Royal Academy in 1922 and a full member in 1930 and ultimately succeeded Sir Alfred Munnings (1878–1959) as president of the academy from 1949 to 1954. His state portraits of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth appeared in 1945, the year of his knighthood. In 1955 he received a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. Ironically, in December of that same year, Kelly had to sell his art collection and library at Sotheby’s, London, so that he could raise the capital to buy his home on Gloucester Place, London. He had lived there for over thirty years but found himself threatened with eviction. Kelly, who would paint some thirty portraits of *Maugham, first met the writer at the suburban Paris summer home (in Meudon) of his brother, *Charles Maugham, in August 1904. Their strong friendship would last sixty years. In *Of Human Bondage (1915), Kelly appears as †Frederick Lawson, a redheaded student at Amitrano’s art school, Paris, and one of the regulars at Gravier’s restaurant (modeled after the actual Le Chat Blanc in the Rue d’Odessa near the Gare Montparnasse). His colleagues predict (with amazing accuracy) that Lawson will return to London, succeed as a fashionable portrait painter, and become an artist of the Royal Academy before he reaches age forty (Kelly was actually forty-three when he became an ARA). Certain readers want to identify Kelly with another character from that novel, †Harry Griffiths, a fifth-year medical student at St. Luke’s Hospital, London. Griffiths has Kelly’s red hair and blue eyes and nurses †Philip Carey during his bout with influenza; however, the parallels between the real painter and the fictional house surgeon-to-be are not terribly strong. Greater concrete associations appear in two of the Ashenden espionage stories (1928), *‘‘The Hairless Mexican’’ and ‘‘The Dark Woman,’’ which come directly from Kelly’s own experiences in Spain. In one of the Ashenden stories, *‘‘His Excellency’’ (1928), Maugham introduces a talented young Irish painter named †O ’Malley: ‘‘He’s an R.A. now and paints highly paid portraits of Lord Chancellors and Cabinet Ministers.’’ Indirectly, Kelly’s sister, Rose, married the occultist Aleister Crowley within two weeks after first meeting him, and that story becomes one of the principal strands of Maugham’s *The Magician (1908). Finally, Kelly proved to have been the person who re-
KING’S SCHOOL
115
vealed the identity of *Ethelwyn Sylvia Jones as the model for †Rosie Driffield in *Cakes and Ale (1930). Bibliography: DNB; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974/1977); Morgan.
KERENSKY, ALEXANDER FYODOROVICH (1881–1970). Russian socialist and revolutionist. Born in Ulyanovsk (or Simbirsk), the son of a high school principal, Kerensky studied law at St. Petersburg and played a leading role in the 1917 revolution against Czar Nicholas II. In March of that year he became minister of justice, in May minister of war, and in July premier of the provisional moderate left government. He crushed the military revolt of the Cossack Lavr Georgyevich Kornilov (1870–1918) in August–September 1917, but the Bolsheviks deposed him on 7 November 1917, principally because of his failure to extricate Russia from World War I and to solve the nation’s economic problems. He then fled to Paris. In 1940, with the approach of the German army into *France, Kerensky went to Australia, then came to the United States in 1946. He authored several volumes on the Russian Revolution, including The Prelude to Bolshevism (1919), The Catastrophe (1927), and The Road to Tragedy (1935). *Maugham’s contact with Kerensky (code name ‘‘Lane’’) came in August 1917, when Maugham functioned as a British agent in Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg, but not yet Leningrad) with the principal mission of keeping revolutionary Russia in the war. The writer/agent actually met him through the efforts of Sasha Kropotkin, and the two usually dined once a week at the fashionable Medvied restaurant. In terms of personality, Kerensky reminded Maugham of *Charles Frohman, the American theater impresario, principally because both possessed the quality of exciting others to do their bidding. In the end, however, Maugham also saw Kerensky as an exhausted political leader, unable to carry the burdens of power. He could not act because of his fear of committing error. In one of the Ashenden stories, *‘‘Mr. Harrington’s Washing’’ (1928), the titled character declares, ‘‘I am †Mr. John Quincy Harrington and I am traveling on behalf of Messers Crewe and Adams of Philadelphia with a special letter of introduction to Mr. Kerensky.’’ Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973, 1989/1990); Crystal; Morgan.
KEYS TO HEAVEN (1917). A play; unpublished and never produced. Bibliography: Stott (1973).
KING’S SCHOOL. Located in Canterbury, Kent, King’s School may well be the oldest educational institution in England, dating from the fifth century. Its most notable pupils include the physician and classical scholar Thomas Linacre (1460?–1524), the poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe (1564–1693), the essayist Walter Horatio Pater (1839–1894), the novelist *Hugh Seymour Wal-
116
KING’S SCHOOL
pole (1884–1941), and *Somerset Maugham. Its low buildings stand on the grounds of Canterbury Cathedral (built between 1175 and 1180) near the central tower, surrounding green courts and old elms. Its high brick wall faces Palace Street. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the headmasters of King’s School also claimed titles as honorary canons of Canterbury Cathedral, and the school specialized in producing young men intent upon becoming Anglican clergymen. Thus, the curriculum emphasized Latin and Greek. The junior school housed boys from eight to thirteen years of age, who then proceeded to the senior school for four additional years before entering (hopefully) university. Maugham’s uncle, the *Reverend Henry MacDonald Maugham, enrolled his eleven-year-old nephew, Willie, in King’s, a seven-mile and twenty-minute train ride from his vicarage at Whitestable, in May 1885, with the intention that the boy would follow his uncle into the Church. Young Maugham would remain enrolled until July 1889. Although Maugham hated King’s, particularly in light of his having to endure constant ridicule because of his stammer and his incompetence in sports, he did well there academically. He stood first in his class for 1886, entered the senior school in 1887 on scholarship, and won the music prize for that year. In 1888, he won prizes in divinity, history, and French. During the winter of 1888–1889, Maugham caught pleurisy and spent some months at Hyeres, a medieval town on the French Riviera, under the guidance of an English tutor. There, perhaps, he determined to sever his connection with King’s School; when he returned in the spring of 1889, he abandoned his study of Greek and performed poorly in mathematics (previously one of his better subjects). He left in July. Despite an almost lifetime dislike of King’s School, Maugham came to the aid of the institution in late 1936, when it faced bankruptcy. The headmaster from 1935 to 1962, Canon F. J. Shirley, called upon the Old Boys for assistance; from Maugham, he requested a new play that could be performed at a benefit for the school. Maugham passed on that offer, but after a visit to the Canterbury, he sent Shirley a dozen eighteenth-century mezzotints for his study. Then came, in 1937, a check for £200 for three tennis courts; later gifts included £3,000 for a boathouse (1950) and £10,000 (1958) to establish scholarships for workingclass boys. However, Shirley could find no one among that class willing to take advantage of the scholarships, so he applied the money toward a physics laboratory. Maugham countered with an additional £5,000 for a library room atop the laboratory and left the 1,300 volumes of his personal library to King’s. As a final gift, Maugham donated to the school the manuscripts of *Liza of Lambeth (1897) and *Catalina (1948)—his first and last novels. Maugham returned to King’s in November 1952 with a request to Canon Shirley that his ashes be buried somewhere within the limits of the school. They settled on the early Norman memorial chapel. In 1958, the writer came again to King’s School for the dedication of the laboratory and library and received the designation as the most distinguished Old Boy of the school. In his address,
KIPLING, (JOSEPH) RUDYARD
117
the eighty-four-year-old writer stated that it might be a good idea for the nation if the English public school system were allowed to expire. Maugham’s tenure at King’s School extends from Chapters 15 through 21 of the 1915 novel *Of Human Bondage. Indeed, headmaster Shirley remarked, after reading the piece, that Maugham had practically photographed everything and everyone about the place. For example, †Rev. Watson, the headmaster of the preparatory school, stands over six feet tall, has enormous hands, and sports a great red beard. Maugham’s master at King’s, a large, jovial man named Rev. Hodgson, also had a red beard. †Mr. Rice, the young master of the lower second form who had taken his degree only the previous year, had been drawn from young Patrick Rice, a native of Dublin. †Thomas Perkins, age thirty-two, assumes the headmastership of King’s School during †Philip Carey’s tenure there. The son of a Tercanbury (Canterbury) linendraper, Perkins had entered King’s as a day boy on scholarship; he proceeded to Magdalen College, Oxford, took Holy Orders, and served at Wellington and Rugby before returning to King’s. His model, Thomas Field, a progressive educator (at least for the time) and an example of a commoner making his way in a world dominated by gentlemen, became the headmaster in 1887 and served until 1896. The son of a Whitestable (in the novel Blackstable) linendraper, he had entered King’s on scholarship, proceeded to Oxford, and spent time at Harrow before returning to his old school. Indeed, the opening of Chapter 15 of Of Human Bondage reads as though Maugham had copied it directly from a history or an advertisement: ‘‘The King’s School at Tercanbury . . . prided itself on its antiquity. It traced its origin to an abbey school, founded before the Conquest, where the rudiments of learning were taught by Augustine monks; and, like many another establishment of this sort, on the destruction of the monasteries it had been reorganized by the officers of King Henry VIII and thus acquired its name.’’ Bibliography: Summing Up; Calder (1989/1990, 1972/1973); Cordell; Eagle and Carnell; Morgan; Rogal (1992).
KIPLING, (JOSEPH) RUDYARD (1865–1936). English poet and fiction writer. Born of British parents, John Lockwood and Alice Kipling, in Bombay, *India, Kipling received his education at an English boarding school in Southsea, then returned to India in 1880. Working as a journalist, he also began to write satirical verse and short fiction. Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and Soldiers Three (1889) secured for him a reputation in England, and in 1889 he returned to England and settled in London. His verse collections, Barrack Room Ballads (1892) and The Seven Seas (1896), proved successful, as did the two Jungle Books (1894– 1895), which remain classic animal stories. Kim came forth in 1901, followed in 1902 by Just So Stories. His later works include Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and the highly autobiographical piece, Something of Myself (1937). In 1907, Kipling received the Nobel Prize in literature. Despite Edmund Wilson’s attempts to ridicule any comparisons between
118
‘‘THE KITE’’
*Maugham and Kipling, Maugham always admired the latter’s work. Indeed, in his view, Kipling stood (at least prior to the twentieth century) as the greatest story writer in England. One of Maugham’s serious problems in achieving status proved to be that, as a writer who relied heavily on remote and exotic settings for his pieces, he had to remain in the shadow of such older writers as *Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) and then Kipling. For example, the language, life, and overall harsh realities of London’s East End that Maugham captured so well in *Liza of Lambeth (1897) had appeared earlier in Kipling’s short story ‘‘The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot’’ (1893). Indeed, the parallels between Maugham’s Vere Street and Kipling’s Gunnison Street, as well as the similarities in the abortive attempts of Liza and Badalia to rise above and beyond their restrictive and suffocating environments, prove interesting study. Of course, both writers dwell on the subject of the abuse of women. More than ten years after Liza of Lambeth, Maugham again tried to walk down Kipling’s path by taking up the by then redundant thesis of empire building. Unfortunately, his †Alexander Mackenzie of *The Explorer (1908) cannot carry the totality of Kipling’s white man’s burden. In noting Maugham’s debt to Kipling, V. S. Pritchett labeled Maugham a Kipling turned inside out, preferring a chaotic jungle of alcohol, beachcombing, and middle-class sex to the ritualistic and orderly hierarchy of Kipling’s jungle. The two writers obviously knew each other, for Maugham reported that they had dined together following the Gene Tunney– Jack Dempsey fight (23 September 1926), and Maugham concluded, with characteristic unkindness, that Kipling had the mind of a fifth-form boy at a secondrate school. Finally, the Maugham–Kipling connection would not be complete without consulting one of Maugham’s relatively late literary labors, his edition of A Choice of Kipling’s Prose (London: Macmillan, 1952), in which he pays tribute to his subject in an introductory essay. Bibliography: Cordell; Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1974); DNB; Drabble; Howe; Morgan; Pritchett; Wilson (1977).
‘‘THE KITE’’ (1947). A short story included in *Creatures of Circumstance. Based in part on *Alan Searle’s experience as a prison visitor at Wormwood Scrubs, the piece, described by the †Narrator as Freudian, focuses upon a young man’s transition from son to husband and back to son following his wife’s destruction of his kite, the principal object of his passion and affection. In 1948, it became a part of *Quartet, the first film made from *Maugham’s short stories. †Ned Preston, the prison visitor at Wormwood Scrubs, relates, through the Narrator, the story of †Herbert Sunbury (called Herb or Bertie), an accountant who has left his wife, †Betty Bevan Sunbury, after she smashed his kite. Herbert has been sent to prison because he refuses to pay weekly alimony to Betty. Described as an intelligent and decent fellow, Herbert is the only child of †Beatrice and †Samuel Sunbury, the former a strong and active person, a true daughter of Victoria, while her husband, a principal clerk in a lawyer’s office,
KNOBLOCK [KNOBLAUCH], EDWARD
119
represents an even truer creature of habit. Herbert had been enamored with kite flying since age seven, and maturity had not dulled his passion. The unity and harmony among the three Sunburys, made even stronger by the presence of the kites, come suddenly asunder when Herbert decides to marry Betty Bevan. Not surprisingly, Ned comments that Betty looked very much the same as Beatrice must have looked at the same age. However, the two women assume an immediate dislike for each other. After the wedding (which Beatrice and thus Samuel refuse to attend), the parents continue their kite flying, but Betty refuses to allow Herbert to participate, referring to the exercise as a sign of immaturity. Eventually, Herbert achieves a reunion with his parents, and the three resume their kite flying on the common, at which point Betty throws Herbert out of their rooms, forcing him to return to the Sunbury home. After weeks of absence, Betty tries to persuade Herbert to return to her; when he refuses, she smashes his new, expensive kite. The †Magistrate sends Herbert to prison when he refuses to pay the weekly alimony. In Herbert Sunbury, Maugham has drawn the portrait of a man caught between two women who want to dominate his life. Betty, insanely jealous of Herbert’s kite flying, smashes his only means of escape from the monotony of life. Thus, there exists little difference for Herbert between life in prison and life without the kite. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance; Cordell; Morgan.
KNOBLOCK [KNOBLAUCH], EDWARD (1874–1945). American dramatist, playwright, and novelist who, although born in New York and educated at Harvard, spent most of his time on the European Continent and in England. In 1916, he became a naturalized British subject. Initially an actor, he turned to the dramatization of fiction and thus became recognized for (what is known in the trade) his work as a ‘‘play carpenter’’ rather than an original playwright. However, he did produce original work: The Faun (1911); Kismet (1911), an Arabian Nights fantasy; My Lady’s Dress (1914); Marie-Odile (1915), a tale of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871); Tiger, Tiger (1918); and The Mulberry Bush (1931). With *Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) he wrote Milestones (1912); with Seymour Hicks (1871–1949), England Expects (1914); with J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), The Good Companions (1931); and with *Beverley Nichols (1898–1983), Evensong (1932). Knoblock dramatized Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight (1909), Simon Called Peter (1924), and Grand Hotel (1931) of Vickie Baum (1896–1960) and Hatter’s Castle (1932). Knoblock’s novels include The Ant Heap (1929), The Man with Two Mirrors (1931), Love Lady (1933), and Inexperience (1941). He also translated plays from the French. Knoblock, who had known *Maugham at least as early as 1913, proved to be still another of Maugham’s literary friends who engaged in espionage during World War I. He had received a commission as a second lieutenant, worked with Maugham in Indian intelligence, and served under Compton Mackenzie
120
KROPOTKIN, ALEXANDRA
(1883–1972) in an operation in Athens, Greece, during the same time that Maugham had been sent to Petrograd on the *Kerensky mission. When Maugham went to Hollywood in December 1920, Knoblock had already arrived, involved in reworking screenplays for Douglas Fairbanks films. The correspondence between the two extends from at least as early as 1914 until Knoblock’s death in 1945. Bibliography: Hartnoll; Morgan.
KROPOTKIN, ALEXANDRA (fl. 1890–1925). Known as Sasha, the daughter of the revolutionary Prince Pyotr (Peter) Alexeyvich Kropotkin (1842–1921). *Maugham had first met her in London, sometime prior to 1914, when she and her father had been living in exile there. The two even had a brief affair. They met again at Petrograd during the period of Maugham’s espionage activities in that city. Intimate with the government of *Alexander Kerensky, Sasha volunteered to help Maugham and to act as his translator. She also introduced the writer to Kerensky and thus attended their weekly dinners as host and translator, either at the Medvied restaurant or at her apartment. Maugham’s close friend *Sir Gerald Kelly painted Sasha Kropotkin’s portrait. In addition, she appeared in one of the Ashenden short stories, *‘‘Mr. Harrington’s Washing’’ (1928), as †Anastasia Alexandrovna Leonidov, ‘‘that illusive spirit of romance . . . [with] fine eyes and a good . . . voluptuous figure, high cheek bones and a snub nose (this was very Tartar), a wide mouth full of large square teeth and a pale skin. . . . In her dark melancholy eyes Ashenden saw the boundless steppes of Russia.’’ Further, in the unpublished play The Road Uphill (1924), Maugham presents the †Grand Duchess Anna Alexandrovna; in *Jack Straw (1912) the †Archduchess Anastasia; and in *Penelope (1912), a second †Archduchess Anastasia. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990), (1972/1973); Morgan.
L LADY FREDERICK: A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS (1911). This proved *Maugham’s first successful play, produced initially by Otho Stuart at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 26 October 1907, with Ethel Irving in the title role; it ran for 422 performances in five West End London theaters (including the Royal Court and Criterion); revived at London in 1913 for 57 performances and again in 1946 for 144 performances. *Charles Frohman produced Lady Frederick on Broadway in 1908 for 96 performances, starring Ethel Barrymore; this was Maugham’s first play produced in the United States. *William Heinemann published the piece at London in 1911, followed by an American edition (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing) in 1912. In 1919, Metro Studios produced a film version, with Ethel Barrymore re-creating her stage role. Before it opened, the play had been sent to at least seventeen different London managers, not one of whom agreed to put it on the stage. Maugham received an advance of $1,000 from the American impresario *George C. Tyler to cover the rights of the play. In early 1908, the New York People’s Magazine asked Maugham to construct a novel from Lady Frederick, but the writer refused. The play actually stands as an expanded version of a short story, *‘‘Lady Habart,’’ which appeared in three issues of Punch in 1900. Supposedly, Maugham developed the title character, †Lady Frederick Berolles, from *Christina Stewart Steevens, the widow of the celebrated foreign correspondent of the London Daily Mail and author of several late-nineteenth-century campaign narratives George Steevens (d.1900). An eccentric Scot and fashionable hostess of her day, she held forth at Merton Abbey, a London house beyond Clapham Common. According to common gossip, Mrs. Steevens had been one of the mistresses of Liberal Party leader Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843–1911), whose divorce proceedings denied him the position of prime minister.
122
‘‘LADY HABART’’
Set in the Hotel Splendide, Monte Carlo, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the piece unfolds with †Lady Maude Mereston (this name appears in six separate dramatic and fictional works of Maugham) explaining to her brother, †Paradine Fouldes, her attempts to prevent her twenty-two-year-old son, †Lord Charles Mereston, from marrying Lady Frederick Berolles, a thirty-five-year-old woman of questionable reputation. Fouldes, a self-possessed bachelor who has run through at least two fortunes, has designs of his own toward Lady Frederick. Lady Frederick, on the other hand, has her own project: attempting to convince †Admiral Carlisle to allow his daughter, †Rose, to marry her brother, †Sir Gerald O’Mara. Although initially against the union, the Admiral will, later in the play, join the line of those who propose marriage to Lady Frederick. Matters become complicated because of the debts owed by both Lady Frederick and O’Mara. Naturally, each of the former’s suitors offers to relieve her of that burden as part of his proposal. †Captain Montgomerie, the urbane son of †Aaron Levitski, a Jewish moneylender, holds the papers for the debts of both Lady Frederick and O’Mara, and (without revealing that fact) he, too, proposes marriage to Lady Frederick. However, before anything can be settled, Lady Frederick discovers that someone has purchased her promissory notes; that matter remains in limbo until Lady Frederick can dispose of her dressmaker, †Madame Ada Claude (she will show herself in another play), to whom she owes £750. To cloud the issue even further, there are letters written by Lady Frederick relative to her earlier affair with the deceased †Roger Bellingham and her part in another affair between Lady Maude Mereston’s equally deceased husband, †Sir George Mereston, and one †Mimi La Bretonne. In the final scene, a dramatic triumph for its time, Lady Frederick, in the presence of young Lord Charles Mereston, sits before a mirror at her dressing table and dons false hair and makeup, demonstrating to him why he should not marry an older woman. The moral proves sufficient for Charles to run and leave the field to others. Fouldes claims his affection for Lady Frederick, and Admiral Carlisle announces that he has paid Gerald O’Mara’s gambling debts and wants to marry her. When Captain Montgomerie enters, Fouldes pays Lady Frederick’s debt to him and orders the moneylender from the room. Fouldes proposes marriage, and Lady Frederick accepts. The real intent of this Edwardian comedy of manners lies in the superficial relationship between Lady Frederick Berolles and young Charles Mereston. In the end, the naive youth must go through the shock of disillusionment before he finally achieves liberation. Most important, he does it with the help of the honest woman. If nothing else, Lady Frederick at least can rise above the hypocrisy that surrounds her. Bibliography: Collected Plays. I.; Barnes; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Loss (1987/1988); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan; Vidal.
‘‘LADY HABART’’ (1900). A short story, published initially in Punch, that became the basis for the 1907 play *Lady Frederick. Initially described as a
THE LAND OF PROMISE: A COMEDY IN FOUR ACTS
123
warm admirer of her personal appearance and as a person convinced of her own personal cleverness, †Lady Dollie Habart, nonetheless, finds herself in Bankruptcy Court. She sends her brother, †Guy Cherriton, a spendthrift, to the moneylender, †Captain Smithson, a Christian gentleman, captain of militia, and a product of public school and an Oxford education. Smithson refuses to allow Lady Habart more time to pay her debt of £3,000, and then follows one of those statements that always seemed to get Maugham into trouble. ‘‘I wish [says Lady Habart] I’d never had anything to do with him [Smithson]. I wish I’d gone to a Jew instead of a Christian. Christians always swindle one more.’’ Donning the armor of her sex, Lady Habart then goes off to confront Smithson. Smithson proves a worthy foe for Lady Habart, who goes harshly against the grain of those stereotypical ‘‘unwashed Hebrews in shabby clothes, malodorous, speaking English with an abominable accent.’’ Indeed, handsome, gentlemanly, and exceedingly well dressed, he ‘‘received his clients in a palatial suite of chambers not three minutes walk from Piccadilly.’’ Lady Habart gets nowhere with Smithson, and she leaves his suite in a fit of indignation. On her way home, she catches a glimpse of an old beau, †Freddy Ramsden, whom she had jilted to marry the now deceased †Lord Habart. A bachelor, Freddie is now a wealthy country squire worth £15,000 per year, having inherited his deceased brother’s country estate. Naturally, Freddy suddenly comes to visit Lady Habart, and she plays the role of the repentant beauty who realizes she made a mistake and should not have jilted him for Habart. However, Freddy will have no part of her tears and moans and leaves. The next day, she waits, convinced that Freddy will return. Smithson phones, asking to see her, but once more—this time not unexpectedly—Freddy returns with a proposal of marriage and a check for £4,000. Lady Habart accepts both. ‘‘If I weren’t going to be married [she exclaims to Guy], I’d go on the stage. What a success I should be.’’ Then Smithson appears, planning to tell Lady Habart that he will allow her another three months in which to pay her debt. However, she never allows him to express that decision and rudely ushers him from the room. Thus, in the end, she believes she has won the game. Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories.
THE LAND OF PROMISE: A COMEDY IN FOUR ACTS (1913, 1922). A play, produced at the Lyceum Theatre, New York, on 25 December 1913 (after a trial run in New Haven, Connecticut, on 26 November), starring Billie Burke (1885–1970) as †Norah Marsh and running for 76 performances; then at London, the Duke of York’s Theatre, on 26 February 1914, starring Irene Vanbrugh (1872–1949) as Norah and lasting for 185 performances. Bickers and Son published the piece in 1913, as did *William Heinemann in London in 1923. Famous Players produced a film version in 1917. In March 1956, *Maugham received a request from an unidentified Frenchman who wanted to translate the piece into Esperanto to demonstrate the suitability of the international language to works of literature.
124
THE LAND OF PROMISE: A COMEDY IN FOUR ACTS
The play opens with the death of †Louisa Wickham, a domineering and disagreeable old maid and resident of Tunbridge Wells. She had promised Norah Marsh, her companion, a generous portion of her estate; instead, the old lady has left everything to her nephew, †James Wickham, and his wife, †Dorothy, neither of whom has paid any attention to her. In addition, James and Dorothy have no intention of sharing any of their aunt’s money with Norah. Norah and a friend, †Agnes Pringle, also a companion, introduce another element into the play, that of the role and status of ‘‘companion.’’ In the provinces, particularly, the position proves one of the few available to gentlewomen—those above the servant class. Unfortunately, as the nation moves further into the twentieth century, the demand for companions has seriously diminished. As Norah contemplates her future, enter †Reginald Hornby, a well-educated spendthrift and motorcar salesman who has been cut off from his father’s money and ordered to Canada. He asks Norah for a letter of introduction to her brother, †Edward Marsh, who has taken up farming in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Norah herself does not consider such a move, since Edward has married a woman beneath his social state. †Gertrude Marsh, who had been earning her own living since age thirteen, had most recently waited on tables at a scrubby little hotel in Winnipeg. However, Norah finds herself with no other choice but to cross the ocean and live with Edward and Gertrude. Once in Canada, Norah renews her acquaintance with Hornby and meets †Frank Taylor, one of Edward Marsh’s hired men; he has worked as a trapper, railroad man, and freighter. Frank owns his own farm at Prentice, Manitoba, but a hailstorm had destroyed his crops and forced him to hire out as a laborer. Another of Marsh’s laborers, †Benjamin Trotter, formerly a bricklayer in England, completes the group. Not unexpectedly, Norah and Gertrude do not get along, owing principally to the extreme differences in their backgrounds and social attitudes. The direction of the piece eventually gains momentum when Taylor announces that he plans to return to his farm at Prentice; before doing so, however, he will stop at the employment office and seek a wife to take back with him. Such a course of action rubs against Norah’s social and moral grain, which, in turn, prompts a heated argument, in front of the men, between Norah and Gertrude. In a moment of passion and frustration, Norah offers to marry Frank Taylor, and he accepts. The newlyweds arrive at Prentice, where they meet †Sidney Sharp, a neighbor and former noncommissioned officer in an English regiment. He and his wife, †Emma, are the parents of five children and typify the hardy English colonials of south-central Canada. However, Norah and Frank have serious difficulties fulfilling the role. Her demands for womanly respect conflict with his demands for wifely obedience. They even go at each other physically, and at one point Norah squeezes the trigger of an unloaded shotgun pointed in Frank’s direction. Eventually, however, the couple make their peace with each other, and Norah even adds the woman’s touch of domesticity to the rough farmhouse. Hornby and Edward Marsh come for a visit, the former stating that he has had his fill
THE LAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN
125
of rusticity and announcing his return to England. Edward bears two letters for Norah: one from Agnes Pringle informing her of an opening for a lady’s companion and another from †Clement Wynne, Louisa Wickham’s solicitor, with a draft for £500. Apparently, James and Dorothy Wickham had decided to give Norah her just share of their aunt’s estate. While Norah wrestles with her conscience, Emma Sharp bursts into the room, announcing the invasion of the mustard flowers, weeds that threaten the ruin of their crops. Sidney Sharp’s crops survive, but Frank Taylor learns that his will have to be destroyed. Frank then insists that Norah return to England, but she refuses. Suddenly discovering the beauty and the rewards of frontier life, Norah produces the £500 bank draft as the means for the revival and continuance of their labor, and she admits to having found love and happiness with Frank. Despite its obvious melodrama, The Land of Promise represents a study of class distinction. Simply, the success of the piece on the London and Broadway stages came from its appeal to pre–World War I upper-middle-class audiences. Maugham could easily turn away from the drama critics’ negative reviews of the piece, knowing that the increase in his bank account from box office royalties would provide him with more than just compensation. Bibliography: Collected Plays. I.; Barnes; Cordell; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
THE LAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN: SKETCHES AND IMPRESSIONS IN ANDALUSIA (1905). The first of *Maugham’s travel books, this one on an 1897 visit to *Spain. The writer completed the work in June 1899. He planned to have it illustrated by a Spanish artist and then serialized in one of the popular magazines. However, he could not find a publisher; in 1902– 1903 he rewrote it in its entirety, with a quick trip to Seville (April 1903) to refresh his memory. Finally, *William Heinemann published it in January 1905, with a printing of 1,250—half of which had to be remaindered. It contained the ironic dedication to *Violet Hunt. In April 1943, Maugham wrote to his friend and editor *Eddie Marsh that Violet had been upset by the dedication, principally because ‘‘she could not imagine what the hell would be her business in such a country.’’ Critical reaction to the piece ran from lukewarm to totally negative, principally because reviewers saw it (and Maugham himself saw it in a similar light) as never really going beyond what had already been done better by others: The Bible in Spain (1843) by George Henry Borrow (1803–1881) and the narratives Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1843) and Gatherings in Spain (1846) by Borrow’s friend Richard Ford (1796–1858). Only the twenty-three-year-old Virginia Stephen (not yet *Virginia Woolf), writing in The Times Literary Supplement for 26 May 1905, claimed that in The Land of the Blessed Virgin, Maugham demonstrated ‘‘control’’ and a ‘‘sincere desire to find the right word for the beauty which he genuinely loves.’’ Alfred Knopf reissued the book in 1920 and 1921.
126
LANDED GENTRY: A COMEDY IN FOUR ACTS
Despite its generally undistinguished quality, the narrative does contain a dramatic and realistic description of a bullfight, which, when translated into Spanish and sold separately, became a fairly popular piece in Spain. Certain sections, such as those on Cervantes and Toledo, prove worth the reader’s time. One can appreciate the twenty-three-year-old Maugham’s romance with, as well as his enthusiasm for, Spain—its landscapes, its people, and its warmth. Bibliography: Cordell; Morgan.
LANDED GENTRY: A COMEDY IN FOUR ACTS (1913). The published title of *Grace: A Play in Four Acts, produced at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, on 15 October 1910, starring Irene Vanbrugh (1872–1949) in the title role and Edmund Gwenn (1875–1959) as the gamekeeper. It ran for only seventy-two performances, principally because *Maugham’s London audience had problems relating to the governing principles of upper-class life in the provinces. Maugham then retitled and published the piece in London (1913) with *William Heinemann and in Chicago (1913) with Dramatic Publishing Company. The play focuses on the situation of †Margaret (Peggy) Gann, the daughter of the gamekeeper †Gann; she had been seduced and finds herself with child. According to the rigid Edwardian principles of the day, †Claude Insoley, the thirty-five-year-old squire of Kenyon-Fulton, Somersetshire, must dismiss the father unless the latter turns Peggy off the land. It matters little that Gann has lived and worked at Kenyon-Fulton all of his life (or forty years), that his father had held the same position fifty-four years before, or that Claude’s father had declared the younger Gann to have been the best gamekeeper he had known. Parallel with this problem, †Grace Insoley, Claude’s middle-class but beautiful London wife, has an affair with †Henry Cobbett, an agreeable young man of twenty-four, who clearly draws the relationship between upstairs and downstairs: the only difference seems to be that Peggy, through her pregnancy, has been discovered. Despite arguments to the contrary, Claude insists that Peggy must leave, ironically because he cannot endure the notion that Grace will have to be in the shadow of the presence of a fallen woman. The situation reaches its obvious climax when Peggy, to save her father’s position, shoots herself. Aside from the insignificant plot of the piece, the Insoley clan warrants a brief look. The widowed mother, †Mrs. Insoley, formerly Miss Bainbridge, controls the family money. She had wanted Claude to marry the fashionable †Helen Vernon and thus bears open contempt for her daughter-in-law. Her current project concerns a scheme to marry Helen, heiress to 5,000 acres and a house that has recently been remodeled, to Claude’s slightly younger brother, the †Reverend Archibald Insoley, vicar of Kenyon-Fulton and formerly curate of Wakefield. Archibald appears kind enough and evidences a good nature. However, he does admit that class means more to him than his clerical calling and that he knows little of the real world. Interestingly enough, although a fact of no
LA PRAIRIE CLINIC
127
great effect upon the Insoleys, Helen Vernon’s great-grandmother, †Mary Vernon, was an abandoned hussy who supposedly had an affair with the Regent. Bibliography: Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
LANGTRY, EMILIE CHARLOTTE LE BRETON (1853–1929). British actress known as Lillie Langtry, or ‘‘the Jersey Lily.’’ Born on Jersey, in the Channel Islands, the daughter of the Reverend W. C. le Breton, dean of Jersey, she developed into one of the most beautiful women of her day. In 1874 (the year of *Maugham’s birth), she married Edward Langtry and became the first society woman to appear on the stage, making her debut under Sir Squire (1841– 1926) and Marie Effie Wilton Bancroft (1839–1921) on 15 December 1881 at the Haymarket Theatre, London, as Kate Hardcastle in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. She caught the attention of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, and became his mistress. Although she served as the manager of the Imperial Theatre, London, that venture proved unsuccessful. Widowed in 1897, Langtry married in 1899 Hugo Gerald de Bathe, after which she maintained a large and successful racing stable. According to Maugham’s own recollections, published in 1962, he first saw Lillie Langtry on the promenade at Deauville, *France, when he was a young boy (age seven or so) walking with his mother and a brother, and the actress approached from the opposite direction. When asked by one of her sons to identify the glamorous woman, Edith Maugham simply (and coldly) responded, ‘‘Nobody.’’ In August 1916, on board ship for New York, Maugham spied the sixty-four-year-old former beauty, admired her fine figure, and introduced himself to her. She shared anecdotes about her former lovers, which Maugham filed for later insertion into his fiction. Specifically, she mentioned an emerald ring given to her by Crown Prince Rudolph, which, during a quarrel, she threw into the fire. The prince got down on his knees and rummaged through the burning coals to find the stone. In *‘‘The Voice of the Turtle’’ (1935), the same incident occurs between †La Falterona and the †Crown Prince of a powerful state. Also, Maugham inserted †Langtry by actual name into three of his pieces: the stories *‘‘Alien Corn’’ (1931) and *‘‘Gigolo and Gigolette’’ and the play *The Circle (1921). She functions, respectively, as a guest in the country house where †Ferdy Rabenstein had once resided; she remembered †Flora Penezzi perfectly; and she once went riding with †Clive Champion-Cheney. Of course, she served as one part of the mosaic from which Maugham molded the model of the actress †Julia Lambert Gosselyn in the novel *Theatre (1937). Interestingly enough, during that 1916 visit to New York, Maugham noticed Langtry on a number of occasions. At public dance halls, the aged actress paid men fifty cents to dance with her, an act that embarrassed the writer. Bibliography: Crystal; DNB; Hartnoll; Morgan.
LA PRAIRIE CLINIC. See under NIEHANS, PAUL.
128
LARREGLE, JEAN
LARREGLE, JEAN (fl. 1927–1965). *Maugham’s fast-driving chauffeur at *Villa Mauresque, Cap Ferrat, on the French Riviera. Among his major responsibilities were to take the cook shopping and convey Maugham’s guests to and from the villa. In June 1939, he informed Maugham that he had been called into the army. His moment of glory arrived in May 1956, when, with the royalties from the long-running play (500 performances) of Adorable Julia (adapted from the 1937 novel *Theatre), Maugham purchased a Rolls Royce. In his will, Maugham granted Jean Larregle £2,000. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Robin Maugham (1978); Morgan.
LAURENCIN, MARIE (1883–1956). Born in Paris, the French painter studied at the Academie Humbart and in 1907 exhibited her work at the Salon des Independents. She established a reputation with her portraits of young girls and women in misty pastel colors and with milk-and-rose complexions and gazelle eyes. She also produced watercolors and lithographs for book illustrations. Laurencin knew *Maugham as a neighbor on the French Riviera and as the owner of four of her paintings, which adorned the walls of the dining room at the *Villa Mauresque. By 1961, they had been relegated to the bathroom. In the summer of 1936, she asked to paint him, and at the end of four days she produced a picture that Maugham viewed as a highly romanticized version of a sixty-two-year-old man. He mounted the portrait on a wall in the upper hall. At some point, Marie Laurencin embroidered a cushion as a complement to Maugham’s Sicilian-styled bed. Bibliography: Crystal; Morgan.
LAWRENCE, D[AVID] H[ERBERT] (1885–1930). English novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist. Born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, Lawrence studied at University College, Nottingham, and then became a schoolmaster. Illness and the success of his first novel, The White Peacock (1911), turned his attention from teaching to writing. In 1912, he eloped with the German-born Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, the wife of his professor of languages at Nottingham, Ernest Weekley. The couple spent the next two years in *Germany, Austria, and *Italy; following Frieda’s divorce in 1914, they married. Lawrence achieved recognition with the publication of Sons and Lovers (1913) and at the outbreak of World War I returned to England. There he published The Rainbow (1915), which caused him to be prosecuted for obscenity. Lawrence left England in 1919 for a three-year residence in Italy, during which he wrote Women in Love (1920). Then followed three years in *Mexico and a return to Italy in 1925. His most famous/infamous work, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, appeared in 1928, published privately in Florence. The British government confiscated those copies that surfaced in England, and not until after the sensational obscenity trial of 1960 did an unexpurgated version reach the English public. Lawrence’s poems may be seen in Birds, Beast and Flowers (1923) and in
LEGRAND, LOUIS
129
the collected edition of 1928. Further novels include Aaron’s Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and the last of his efforts, published in the year of his death, The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930). One should also consult the seven-volume edition of his Letters (1979–1993). The contact between *Maugham and Lawrence proved minimal, principally because they did not like each other. The literary period from 1910 to 1930 had been termed ‘‘the age of Lawrence,’’ and Maugham’s name could not rise above that of the writer eleven years his junior. Only in the year of Lawrence’s death, with the publication of *Cakes and Ale (1930), did Maugham manage to achieve the literary recognition that he so desperately sought. Lawrence viewed Maugham’s talents as commercial rather than artistic; in his view, Maugham represented the financially successful London establishment from which Lawrence had been banned. For his part, Maugham saw Lawrence as purely pathological and abnormally irritable. The two found themselves in Mexico City at the same time in late October 1924—Lawrence with Frieda, Maugham in the company of *Gerald Haxton. On 29 October, Lawrence wrote to Witter Bynner that Maugham ‘‘left for Cuernavaca the day we got in but apparently he too is no loss. Disagreeable, with no fun left in him, and terrified for fear he won’t be able to do his next book, with a vivid Mexican background, before Christmas. A narrow-gutted ‘artist’ with a stutter.’’ When the two met again in Florence in early May 1926, Lawrence again noted his annoyance with Maugham, although he told their mutual friend, *Reginald Turner, that ‘‘if he’d like to see me, I’d like to see him.’’ Finally, on 6 January 1930, Lawrence wrote bitterly to Aldous Huxley, ‘‘I hear Maugham and Wells and Co. are rolling their incomes around Nice for Christmas, rich as pigs.’’ On 20 July 1928, Lawrence reviewed Maugham’s *Ashenden stories for the London Vogue. Insofar as concerned the title character, Lawrence accused him of attempting to prove ‘‘that all men and women are either dirty dogs or imbeciles.’’ Further, he discounted the reality of Ashenden’s experiences, claiming that all of his actions were ‘‘fake.’’ The characters, he concluded, were ‘‘nothing but puppets, instruments of the author’s pet prejudices.’’ Maugham waited until 1943, through his *Introduction to Modern English and American Literature, before any public reaction. After all, Lawrence had been safely stored away beneath the earth of Alpes Maritimes for more than a dozen years. He referred to Lawrence’s short fiction as ‘‘formless and verbose,’’ and his sentences, though ravishingly beautiful, had ‘‘the general effect’’ of being ‘‘lush and airless.’’ Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Crystal; Curtis (1974/1977); DNB; Drabble; Huxley; Morgan.
LEGRAND, LOUIS (fl. 1935–1946). Known as ‘‘Lulu,’’ Legrand numbered among those interestingly sordid characters who hovered about the fringes of *Maugham’s lifestyle on the French Riviera. A tall, thin young man, originally
130
‘‘THE LETTER’’
from a French family of miners, he had drifted to the vicinity of St. Jean, where, at some point in the mid-1930s, he became the boyfriend of Maugham’s secretary/companion *Gerald Haxton. Both were tubercular. Gerald, in turn, introduced Legrand into the circle of Maugham’s *homosexual friends. When, in 1940, Maugham left Cap Ferrat for England and then the United States, Haxton, who would join him there, left the *Villa Mauresque in charge of Legrand, with instructions to sell his sailboat, the Tenace. For the next four years, Haxton sent him 3,000 francs each month, food parcels, and autographed pictures of *Hollywood movie stars. When the dying Haxton wrote his will in July 1944, he left ‘‘a small sum’’ of money, on deposit in an English bank, to Legrand. Legrand next appeared in Paris in May 1945, engaged to house-sit Maugham’s apartment at 65 Rue La Fontaine. However, he was, in reality, functioning as a male prostitute and entertaining his clients in Maugham’s apartment. Maugham immediately sold the flat, but he did honor Haxton’s will by paying Legrand the sum Haxton had indicated. Bibliography: Jonas (1959/1972); Kanin; Robin Maugham (1978); Morgan.
‘‘THE LETTER’’ (1924). A short story published initially in 1924 and included in the 1926 collection *The Casuarina Tree. *Maugham based the piece on a news story he had read in a Singapore newspaper of 23 April 1911. An English lawyer, C. Dickinson, and his wife had relayed the actual account to him. A Mrs. Mabel Proudlock, wife of a headmaster at Kuala Lumpur, shot the manager of a tin mine, William Crozier Steward, claiming that the latter accosted her on her front porch during her husband’s absence. At the trial, the prosecutor claimed that Mrs. Proudlock had been on intimate terms with Steward, who also kept a Chinese mistress. The jury found her guilty and sentenced her to be hanged. Her husband cabled the secretary of state for colonies, asking for clemency for his wife, while a petition on her behalf amassed more than 700 signatures. Further, the women of Kuala Lumpur asked Queen Mary to pardon Mabel Proudlock as a coronation gesture, and still another petition for her pardon came before the sultan of Selangor, who did pardon her in July 1911. After a month in jail, Mabel Proudlock returned alone to England, where she died in an asylum for the insane. Maugham’s story twists and turns in and out of the original event. †Leslie Crosbie, the wife of †Robert Crosbie, a rubber planter in Singapore, has murdered †Geoffrey Hammond—an acquaintance of the Crosbies, a handsome, decorated war veteran and the manager of a neighboring rubber estate. According to Leslie, Robert had gone to the city; Hammond came to the house and, after several drinks, tried to rape her. She responded by emptying six bullets into him. The police arrest Leslie, who will be defended by the Crosbies’ friend and lawyer †Mr. Joyce. Although convinced of Leslie’s innocence, Joyce appears bothered because Leslie shot Hammond not once, but six times. Joyce’s fashionable and intelligent Chinese clerk, †Ong Chi Seng, then re-
THE LETTER. A PLAY IN THREE ACTS
131
veals to his employer the existence of a letter from Leslie Crosbie to Geoffrey Hammond, written on the day of the shooting and requesting that Hammond come to the Crosbies’ bungalow that night (particularly since her husband will be gone). Although Ong Chi Seng produces only an undated copy, he claims that the original resides with Hammond’s Chinese mistress. The woman’s choice, of course, is to sell it to Joyce or turn it over to the †Deputy Public Prosecutor. Joyce shows the copy to Leslie, who initially denies that she wrote it. Then she explains that she asked Hammond to come to discuss a gun that she planned to buy for Robert’s birthday. Joyce pursues the matter further with her, and she breaks down, pleading with him not to let the Crown hang her for her actions. At that point, Joyce decides to commit an impropriety. Back in his office, he learns from Ong Chi Seng that the woman will sell the original of the letter for $10,000. Joyce tells Crosbie about the letter, but from the view of Leslie’s wanting to talk with Hammond about the proposed gun for Robert’s birthday. Crosbie borrows the money from †Charlie Meadows, with the security of his shares and estates. He and Joyce then proceed to Hammond’s house and purchase the letter from the †Chinese Woman. After the transaction, Crosbie tells Joyce that he had gone to *Singapore on the night of the murder to purchase a new gun. At the conclusion of the trial, the assessors require less than five minutes to acquit Leslie Crosbie. After an immediate postacquittal luncheon, Leslie tells Joyce that indeed she and Hammond had been lovers, and she simply could not endure the fact that he had thrown her over for the Chinese Woman. She knows that Robert knows the truth. At the conclusion of her story, Joyce sees the face of Leslie Crosbie as a ‘‘a gibbering, hideous mask.’’ However, in a minute, she collects herself to become ‘‘cool and calm and unlined. . . . She was once more the well-bred and even distinguished woman.’’ Leslie Crosbie may have recovered her composure, but she nonetheless remains one of Maugham’s principal examples of the degeneration of the English colonist once he or she has settled into the isolated life. Further, the sinister Ong Chi Chen proves the agent of that degeneration, which only demonstrates the inability of natives and colonists to achieve anything close to harmony or respect for each other. There exists little doubt that although ‘‘The Letter’’ made for good reading and was an excellent story, it did little to help Maugham gain favor with either group. Bibliography: Casuarina Tree; Complete Stories. I. East and West; Calder (1972/ 1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Morgan; Mortimer.
THE LETTER. A PLAY IN THREE ACTS (1925). Adopted from the short story (1924) of the same title. It opened at the Playhouse, London, on 25 February 1927, starring Gladys Cooper (1881–1971) as †Leslie Crosbie, and ran for 338 performances. In the United States, Messmore Kendall produced it at the Morosco Theatre on 26 September 1927, directed by Guthrie McClintic
132
LEVERSON, ADA
(1893–1961) and starring Katharine Cornell (1898–1974) as Leslie Crosbie. George H. Doran and Company published the play in New York in 1925; an Arno Press reprint appeared in 1977. Jeanne Eagles (1894–1929) as Leslie Crosbie and *Herbert Marshall (1892–1966) as †Geoffrey Hammond made the first film version for Paramount in 1929, while Marshall (this time as †Robert Crosbie) and Bette Davis as Leslie Crosbie appeared in the 1940 film adaptation from Warner Brothers, the latter studio supplying an additional murder to the exercise. The major difference in the theater version from its short fiction original focuses on the ending. In the play, Crosbie does not see the letter until after the trial and asks Leslie what it means. She responds by announcing that Hammond was her lover, at which point Crosbie runs from the stage. The lawyer, †Howard Joyce (*Maugham gave him a first name for the theater), tells Leslie that Robert will forgive her, since he cannot go on without her. Leslie has the final word by telling Joyce that although she does not love her husband, she will never let him know that. Her punishment will lie in the knowledge that she killed the man whom she really loved. To keep the letter from Robert Crosbie, Joyce advances the $10,000 to pay the †Chinese Woman for the letter from his own account. Thus, Crosbie finds out about the letter when he must repay Joyce, rather than apply the money toward the purchase of an estate. Insofar as concerns the go-between †Ong Chi Seng, in the story, Maugham tells us only that he speaks precise English and possesses an industrious, obliging, and exemplary character. In the play, Ong Chi Seng holds a law degree from the University of Hong Kong, has become a disciple of the evolutionist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and has been influenced by Nietzsche, *George Bernard Shaw, and *H. G. Wells. Those qualities only serve to enhance Maugham’s dislike of him. Bibliography: Cordell; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
LEVERSON, ADA (1862–1933). English writer of fiction. The daughter of Samuel Beddington, an affluent Jewish wool merchant and property investor, and Zillah Simon Beddington, a talented amateur pianist, she received a private education at home, and, at age nineteen, she challenged her parents’ orders and married Ernest Leverson (b.1850), a diamond merchant, gambler, and speculator. The two endured each other until 1900, when the bankrupt Ernest Leverson migrated to Canada. The couple did manage two children, a son who died in infancy and a daughter, Violet Wyndham, who eventually wrote her mother’s biography. Initially, Leverson published articles, sketches, and parodies in Punch, Black and White, and the Yellow Book. Her relationship with *Oscar Wilde began in 1892, with her ‘‘An Afternoon Party,’’ a parody of his Gothic melodramatic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), which appeared in Yellow Book. She also parodied Wilde’s poem ‘‘The Sphinx’’ in 1894, and that exercise earned
LEWIS, (HARRY) SINCLAIR
133
her the nickname ‘‘Sphinx.’’ Her friendship with Wilde brought Leverson in close contact with such artists and literati as Aubrey Beardsley, George Moore, and *Max Beerbohm. She proved particularly supportive of Wilde during his 1895 trial for *homosexuality and numbered among the small group who met and hosted Wilde immediately after his release from prison. Following her husband’s departure for Canada, Leverson began to write novels. She produced The Twelfth Hour (1907), Love’s Shadow (1908), The Limit (1911), Tenterhooks (1912), The Bird of Paradise (1914), and Love at Second Sight (1916)—all of them written in bed, dictated to a typist, and published by Grant Richards, who also offered her encouragement to write. *Maugham met Ada Leverson sometime in 1908, and she complimented him for being so much like Oscar Wilde. In addition, she gave him a small but highly visible role in her third novel, The Limit. (The very successful but always calm playwright Gilbert Hereford Vaughan, thirty-four years of age and known to his friends as Gillie, had produced eleven plays, all written out of his head ‘‘and all being performed simultaneously in American, in Eskimo, and even in Turkish, besides in every known European language.’’ No matter whom or what he looked at, ‘‘his dark opaque eyes were so full of vivid expression that women often mistook for admiration what was often merely observation.’’) Their friendship, underscored by a significant quantity of correspondence, lasted until 1911. Indeed, Yale University houses no less than thirty-eight letters that Maugham wrote to Leverson during this brief period. Bibliography: Behrman (1960); Calder (1989/1990, 1972/1973); Hart-Davis; Morgan; Shattock.
LEWIS, (HARRY) SINCLAIR (1885–1951). American novelist and the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for distinction in world literature (1930). Born in Sauk Center, Minnesota, he studied at Yale University before practicing as a journalist and writing a number of minor pieces. In 1920, he published Main Street, the first in a series of best-selling novels that satirized small-town life in the United States. With Babbitt (1922), Lewis established the collective synonym for the typical boorish businessman who inhabited those towns across middle America. Lewis refused the Pulitzer Prize for 1926 for Arrowsmith (1925), but he obviously had a change of mind for the Nobel Prize five years later. His other novels worth noting include the attack upon religious hypocrisy, Elmer Gantry (1927); the story of a retired American manufacturer, Dodsworth (1929); Cass Timberlane (1945); and Kingsblood Royal (1947). *Maugham first met Lewis, in company with *Hugh Walpole and *St. John Ervine, for lunch in London on 2 February 1922. The American writer had been in residence in the English capital since January of that year, working on Babbitt. Maugham admired Main Street, claiming that the novel had helped him to understand Americans. He quickly invited Lewis to dinner on two separate occasions later that February, reminding him to wear a dinner jacket. Unfortunately,
134
LINLITHGOW, LORD
Lewis donned the role of the drunken and boorish American and embarrassed everyone. Although Maugham lost interest in Lewis as a social companion, he retained an admiration for his fiction. At the end of the year, after he had read Babbitt, Maugham wrote Lewis a long letter of congratulations from Bangkok, being especially appreciative of the depiction of boorish people who never seemed willing or able to recognize themselves. Interestingly enough, when Lewis won the Nobel Prize in 1930, Maugham did not transmit a single word to him. Bibliography: Crystal; Hart; Morgan.
LINLITHGOW, LORD. See HOPE, LORD JOHN. ‘‘THE LION’S SKIN’’ (1938). A short story, published initially in 1938, then included in the collection *The Mixture As Before (1940). †Robert Forestier, former page boy, trooper, valet, and car washer, has donned the mask of a perfect English gentleman. He and his wife, †Eleanor, an American heiress from Portland, Oregon, live on the Riviera; Forestier proves an an excellent golfer and bridge player, as well as a connoisseur of wines. Ironically, in relation to the last quality, Robert turns out to be the son of a wine waiter at a London club. Eleanor Forestier, older than her husband, is described as absurd, homely, and foolish, yet ‘‘her ungainly exterior sheltered a tender, romantic and idealistic soul.’’ The Forestiers’ house catches fire; acting the part of the true English gentleman, Robert runs inside to save his wife’s Sealyham dog. He pays for his actions with his life. Simply, having pretended for so many years to be a gentleman, he forgot, in the end, that he was not; he acted as he thought a gentleman would and must act. When their neighbor, †Frederick Hardy, who had known Robert Forestier years ago, tells Eleanor of her husband’s death, he ends the story with, ‘‘Mrs. Forestier, he was a very perfect gentleman.’’ After all, Hardy should know, since at age twenty-five, women and horses had forced him into bankruptcy; after having been a salesman, outside broker, commission agent, and actor, he married and inherited a baronetcy. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Mixture As Before; Curtis (1974); Morgan.
LIZA OF LAMBETH (1897). *Maugham’s first novel (intended to be titled A Lambeth Idyl), begun in summer 1895 and finished by mid-January 1897, while he still functioned as a medical student at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London, and published in London by *Thomas Fisher Unwin, who issued 2,000 copies at three shillings-sixpence each; revised edition in 1904; issued in New York in 1921 by George Doran; Penguin Books edition, London, 1967; reprinted in 1977 by Arno Press. Maugham dedicated the work to *(Adney) Walter Payne, his
LIZA OF LAMBETH
135
roommate from 1898 to 1917. The writer eventually donated the manuscript of the novel to King’s School, Canterbury. The novel exists, essentially, as a series of sharp character sketches of London low-class working life at the end of the nineteenth century. Maugham focuses upon the improper relationship between †Liza Kemp (Kemp will reappear in *Of Human Bondage [1915] and *Cakes and Ale [1930]) and †Jim Blakeston, while the corps of secondary characters serves to provide sufficient foreshadowing of the final tragedy. Caught in the brutal life of the depressing borough of Lambeth, which Maugham essentially reduces to the single Vere Street, Liza, at age eighteen, works in a factory and gives the largest proportion of her wages to her drunken mother. For her part, the sixty-five-year-old †Mrs. Kemp has nothing good to say to, or about, anyone. Life could be somewhat pleasant for Liza if she would entertain and accept the affections of †Tom, a young and honest factory worker who truly loves her. Indeed, his concern for, and loyalty to, Liza throughout her misguided experiences prove the single and most genuinely kind emotion on the part of any of the residents of Vere Street. However, Liza instead associates herself with †Jim Blakeston, a married man with five living children. Jim proves the stereotype of the lower-class brute: he drinks heavily, loves but neglects his children, keeps his wife pregnant and beats her, and generally maintains a sharp eye upon any decent-looking woman with whom he can effectuate a liaison. To demonstrate that Liza Kemp’s situation is not a rarity on Vere Street, Maugham offers †Sally Cooper and †Henry (Harry) Atkins. A friend and fellow factory worker of Liza, Sally gives up her job to marry Harry. Harry, too, drinks to relieve the boredom, and when he does, he beats Sally. However, the latter possesses too much pride to tell anyone about it. At any rate, Liza becomes pregnant with Jim Blakeston’s child, a fact not ignored by Tom, who still offers to marry her. †Mrs. Blakeston, Jim’s wife, knows of her husband’s affair with Liza, attacks her, and delivers the fatal beating that, in combination with a drunken stupor and exposure to the night air, causes the girl’s miscarriage and death. Although momentarily depressed by the event, Jim Blakeston will undoubtedly recover and continue upon the same course. In choosing to confront the realities of life head-on, the young Maugham grasped firmly the upper-class traditional cure for the plight of the poor: infant mortality would serve effectively to control the population, and violence in the streets would prove equally efficient in settling important issues. Thus, Vere Street teems with major fights and minor scuffles, while practically every female character (most of whom go without names) has given birth at least three or four times—with equal numbers of miscarriages. For example, Mrs. Kemp can claim thirteen children, while Mrs. Blakeston, we are told fairly early on, awaits the birth of her tenth child. Most important, Maugham tried very hard to capture the language of the people he drew within the Cockney slum of Lambeth. Thus, although his readers may have been mildly shocked or even disgusted by what they witnessed, they at least saw it through the observant (if not always expe-
136
LOAVES AND FISHES: A COMEDY IN FOUR ACTS
rienced) eye of the medical student who had studied and knew his human social anatomy and who, by his own admission, had followed the mind and the craft of Maupassant. Bibliography: Brander; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Epstein; Keating; Morgan; Stott (1973); Vidal; Viswanath.
LOAVES AND FISHES: A COMEDY IN FOUR ACTS (1924). A play, written in 1903, that formed the basis for *Maugham’s 1906 novel *The Bishop’s Apron (both of which came from the short story ‘‘Cupid and the Vicar of Swale’’ [1900]); produced by *Charles Frohman at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, on 24 February 1911, starring *Robert Loraine (1876–1935) as †Canon Theodore Spratte, Basil Hallam, Frances Ivor, Thomas Holding, and Marie Hemingway. *William Heinemann published the piece in London in 1924. The stage version proved a failure, running for only forty-eight performances, and was never produced in the United States. Critics found it a weakly constructed play, and they determined that little difference existed between it and the 1906 novel (and, indeed, little difference does exist). For his part, Maugham believed, after reading more than fifty letters sent to him, that the public wanted no part of watching a clergyman ridiculed and made to look foolish. For a discussion of plot and characters, see under BISHOP’S APRON. Bibliography: Barnes; Curtis (1974); Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
LOHR, MARIE (1890–1975). Actress. A distinguished Australian stage and film actress who began her career in Sydney in 1894 and then on the London stage in 1901, at age eleven. She played Mrs. Reginald Bridgenorth in the first production of *George Bernard Shaw’s Getting Married (1908) at the Haymarket, London. Her career attracted considerable attention with her performance as Lady Teazle in the revival of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1909). Lohr continued to play leading roles with the foremost managers of the day, including *Charles Frohman, George Alexander, and Gerald Du Maurier. In 1918 she went into management at the Globe Theatre, London, with her husband, Anthony Prinsep, remaining there until 1927. In December 1927, she made the first of several appearances as Mrs. Darling in James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Beginning in the 1930s her roles seemed almost exclusively limited to dowagers: Aren’t We All (1932), Pygmalion (1938), Major Barbara (1940), The Winslow Boy (1948), A Town like Alice (1956). Her final appearance came in 1966 as Mrs. Whitefield in the revival of Shaw’s Man and Superman. Lohr, at age nineteen, starred in *Maugham’s *Smith when it opened on 30 September 1909, at the Duke of York’s Theatre; Irene Vanbrugh replaced her in October of that year. Some ten years later, she played the role of †Sybil Bruce in *Love in a Cottage, a play that Maugham had written especially for her prior to his being sent on the espionage mission to Russia and that opened
LORAINE, ROBERT
137
on 26 January 1918 at the Globe Theatre, London. Finally, Lohr appeared in *The Bread-Winner, opening on 30 September 1930 at the Vaudeville, London. Bibliography: Barnes; Hartnoll; Halliwell; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
‘‘LOOKING BACK ON EIGHTY YEARS’’ (1962). *Maugham began working on this collection of autobiographical fragments in November 1960; then, when he finished, he locked it in a bank vault and secured a promise from his secretary/companion, *Alan Searle that it never be published. Actually, Maugham’s publishers, *William Heinemann and Doubleday, would have nothing to do with it. However, Searle convinced the aged and not always lucid Maugham to sell the work to the London Sunday Express for £3,500. Searle even contributed photographs to illustrate the text and willingly provided additional anecdotes to flavor the piece. Thus, that paper serialized it in eight installments from 9 September through 28 October 1962. The series created a public sensation. More important, because of Maugham’s efforts to disgrace his deceased wife, *Syrie Barnardo Maugham, the series caused a deep rift between Maugham and his daughter, *Liza. In addition, the playwright *Noel Coward, who had been longtime friends of both Maugham and Syrie, rose indignantly and declared that he would have nothing more to do with the former. Specifically, Maugham asserted that he really never loved Syrie, nor did he wish to marry her. He did it for the sake of their daughter, to give legitimacy to her life. In a word, he declared that he had been blackmailed into the marriage. Further, he accused Syrie of being a scatterbrain and a snob, selfish, egocentric, dishonest, unscrupulous, and promiscuous. Of course, what compounded the issue was that Syrie could not defend herself, although a number of her friends came to the rescue of her reputation and, in turn, attacked Maugham. Generally, Maugham’s biographers view ‘‘Looking Back’’ as outpourings of a spiteful old man approaching senility, and thus little or nothing in it should be considered seriously. One should know, however, that the sketches go beyond the defamation of Syrie. Maugham does discuss and shed some light upon his relationships with such individuals as his mother, *Ethelwyn Sylvia (Sue) Jones, Gerald Kelly, and *Winston Churchill. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1974); Morgan.
LORAINE, ROBERT (1876–1935). English actor/manager. He first appeared on the stage in 1869, playing with *Herbert Draper Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917) and George Alexander (1858–1918), then starred as D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers (1899). After service in the Boer War, Loraine went to the United States, then returned to England to play Henry V. Playing several *Shaw pieces, he began his career as a manager in 1911 at the Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly Circus, London. As an aviator in World War I, Loraine received decorations for gallantry, after which he returned to the stage in the title role of Cyrano de
138
‘‘LORD MOUNTDRAGO’’
Bergerac (1919). Although essentially a romantic actor, he could do well in serious melodrama. On 30 September 1909, Loraine (as †Thomas Freeman) and *Marie Lohr (in the title role) opened *Maugham’s *Smith at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, for 168 performances. In *Loaves and Fishes, he substituted for an actor named Aynesworth, who walked off the stage in the middle of rehearsals, and starred as †Canon Theodore Spratte during the few forty-eight performances that the piece ran at the Duke of York’s Theatre (beginning 24 February 1911). Bibliography: Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
‘‘LORD MOUNTDRAGO’’ (1939, 1940). A short story published initially in 1939, then included in the collection *The Mixture As Before (1940). †Lord Mountdrago, the arrogant, selfish, and Conservative secretary for foreign affairs, whose title dates from Charles II and whose aim is greatness, suffers from nightmares. Those focus upon an †Owen Griffiths, an obscure Welsh Labour Party member of Parliament (MP), a commoner, whom Mountdrago had ridiculed and humiliated so thoroughly in a debate that he had practically ruined the person’s career. Further, he has convinced himself that he and Griffiths have been experiencing the same dreams. After consultation with, and medication from, his physician, †Sir Augustus Fitzherbert, he seeks medical help from a psychoanalyst, †Dr. Audlin, who tells him that an apology to the MP exists as the only cure. ‘‘The words acted on Lord Mountdrago like the blow of a whip across his face.’’ Mountdrago cannot bring himself to do that and thus takes his own life by stepping in front of a train. Owen Griffiths dies on the same day, apparently from natural causes. Dr. Audlin cannot help but wonder if Mountdrago had sought relief from his torment in death, but that Griffiths, escaping from his own mortality, ‘‘had pursued him to some other sphere, there to torment him still.’’ *Maugham looked upon ‘‘Lord Mountdrago’’ as his most difficult piece because of the need to convince his readers of its reality. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Mixture As Before; Morgan.
‘‘THE LOTUS EATER’’ (1935). A short story, published initially in 1935, then included in the collection *The Mixture As Before (1940). *Maugham supposedly based this story partly on *John Ellingham Brooks (1864–1929), the Cambridge *homosexual whom he had met in Heidelberg in 1890. Brooks had gone to *Capri following the *Oscar Wilde trial of 1895, where he blossomed into a literary failure, supported by an American wife, a lesbian. More important than its purely biographical connection, the story exists as but one more example of Maugham’s interest in a character who intentionally departs from the traditional course of life. Maugham’s story, set on Capri in 1913, concerns forty-nine-year-old †Thomas Wilson, who, in 1898 and at age thirty-five, had left his position as manager
LOVE IN A COTTAGE
139
of the Crawford Street branch of the York and City Bank and settled on Capri. His wife had died of bronchial pneumonia, and their only child, a daughter, had gone to live with her grandmother, where she died from blood poisoning. He had enough money to last until he reached age sixty, at which point he intended to end his life. He filled his days on Capri with bathing, walking, playing the piano, and playing cards. When the moment came to end his life, however, Wilson could not perform the act and thus lives out the remainder of his existence in poverty and humiliation and not entirely possessed of his senses. His landlord’s wife, †Assunta, agrees to keep him and treats him as a child. Within six years, he dies, his body found lying near two great rocks standing out from the sea and called the Faragioni. ‘‘Perhaps,’’ mused the †Narrator, ‘‘he died of the beauty of that sight.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Mixture As Before; Morgan.
‘‘LOUISE’’ (1925). A short story, published initially in 1925, then included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). The †Narrator has known †Louise Maitland almost intimately for the past twenty-five years, but she dislikes him. Her first husband, the wealthy and athletic †Tom Maitland, died from a cold, while her second mate, the soldier †George Hobhouse, is killed in the war. Louise herself had a heart weakened by scarlet fever, and she manipulates the state of her health to her advantage. ‘‘I think,’’ declares the Narrator to her, ‘‘you’ve carried out for twenty-five years a stupendous bluff. I think you’re the most selfish and monstrous woman I have ever known.’’ She turns her house at Monte Carlo into a convalescent hospital for officers, and after the war, she and her daughter, †Iris Maitland, return to London. Iris receives a marriage proposal, but it must be postponed because of Louise’s supposed ill health. However, the Narrator demands that Iris allow the marriage to go forward. ‘‘On the weddingday, at ten o’clock in the morning, Louise, that devilish woman, had one of her heart attacks—and died. She died gently forgiving Iris for having killed her.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
LOVE IN A COTTAGE (1917, 1918). A four-act play that opened at the Globe Theatre, London, on 26 January 1918 and ran for 127 performances. *Maugham never published the piece, written in 1917 specifically for the actress *Marie Lohr (1890–1975) prior to his accepting the assignment as an espionage agent at Petrograd, Russia. He blended a number of familiar circumstances arising from money and illness. Set at the Hotel Splendide, Lake Como, the play introduces †Sybil Bruce, a nurse who inherits a fortune upon the death of her estranged husband, †Arundel Bruce. However, attached to that inheritance rests the familiar provision that if she remarries, she loses all of it. Pursued by an interesting and almost comic coterie of fortune hunters and parasites, she finally agrees to marry the penniless
140
LUCE, (ANN) CLARE BOOTHE
hotel physician, †Doctor Bell, a pipe-smoking romantic who truly loves her, sees himself as an artist, and wants only a private practice in the country. Thus, Sybil determines to rid herself of Arundel’s money and settle for love in a cottage with Bell. Although the play received only lukewarm critical attention, it achieved popularity for its time as an example of romantic escape in the midst of wartime depression. Further, Maugham presented a number of characters whose stupidity and hypocrisy produce good humor. For example, Sybil’s employer, †Mrs. Owen Butterfield, represents the malade imaginaire who gives everyone a terribly difficult time. She tries to arrange a marriage between Sybil and her nephew, †Martin Arrol, an arrangement attractive to Arrol’s materialistic and political ambitions. Of course, he leaves the field in disappointment upon learning of the restrictions placed upon Sybil’s inheritance. Two of the parasites, †Lady and †Lord Barchester, have no money, only rich friends from whom they borrow to pay off their gambling debts, while the †Reverend Archibald Palmer, with his wife a guest at the Hotel Splendide, continually begs money from Sybil. On a more serious note, †Owen Butterfield, the millionaire husband of Mrs. Butterfield and Martin Arrol’s uncle, has lost all interest in, and feeling for, humanity—with the exceptions of Sybil and Dr. Bell. His wife and Arrol plot to have him confined as a lunatic, and in the end he shoots himself. Bibliography: Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
LUCE, (ANN) CLARE BOOTHE (1903–1987). American playwright and editor. Born in New York City, the daughter of businessman and amateur violinist William F. Boothe and Ann Clare Snyder Boothe, a former dancer. Educated privately, she then attended St. Mary’s School, Garden City, New York, and Miss Mason’s School, Tarrytown-on-Hudson, New York. After divorcing William Boothe, the elder Clare Boothe married Dr. Albert E. Austin, who later represented his district of Connecticut in Congress. Eventually, Clare the younger became editor of Vogue magazine (1930) and associate and then managing editor of Vanity Fair (1930–1934). In addition, she wrote a number of plays, two of which achieved success on Broadway: The Women (1936) and Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938). Luce married her first husband, George Tuttle Brokaw (d.1935), in 1923, divorced him in 1929, and, in 1935, married millionaire publisher Henry Robinson Luce (1898–1967), a principal influence (financial as well as philosophical) in the Republican Party. She won election to the House of Representatives in 1942 as a Republican from Connecticut (from the same district as her stepfather), served two terms until 1947, and later received appointment as U.S. ambassador to Italy (1953–1957). She served on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1974) and on Ronald Reagan’s foreign intelligence advisory board from 1982. Luce became the first woman to receive the Sylvanus Thayer Award for distinguished civil service and in 1983 accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
‘‘THE LUNCHEON’’
141
*Maugham knew both Luce and her publisher husband. He corresponded with the former and visited them fairly regularly when he lived in the United States during World War II, and she came to the *Villa Mauresque on more than one occasion after the war. However, their relationship actually began sometime after 1915, when the teenaged Clare, living in Connecticut, had finished reading Maugham’s *Of Human Bondage (1915). She wrote a letter to the writer, telling him of her own unhappy childhood, her desire to become a writer, and the lack of support from her mother. Maugham responded with six pages of solace and advice, compassion and encouragement. Bibliography: Crystal; Current Biography, 1953, 1987; Morgan.
‘‘THE LUNCHEON’’ (1924). A short story, published initially in 1924 and included in the collection *The Cosmopolitans (1936). In 1952, for whatever reasons, the story was included in a volume entitled New Method English for the Arab World, and in 1956 *Maugham entertained a request that it be included in an anthology for Swedish schools. Following an absence of twenty years, the †Narrator, a writer, catches sight of the †Woman at a play, which causes him to reflect upon their initial meeting. She had first met him in Paris, after she had read one of his books and had written to him, suggesting that they meet at Foyot’s restaurant for lunch. The Narrator, flattered, had agreed, even though he then had only eighty francs to last him for the remainder of the month. She proved, at age forty, to be considerably older than he, but slim and very attractive. The Narrator then received two shocks: the prices on the Foyot’s menu and the size of the Woman’s appetite. The piece plods forward, with running commentary upon the delicacy (and expense) of each dish that the Woman orders. Panic seizes the Narrator, as he worries whether his eighty francs will even cover the bill. Worse yet, he may even have to borrow money from his luncheon companion. However, he does have enough for both the bill and an inadequate gratuity of three francs. At the end, the Narrator eventually realizes his revenge for having had to go hungry for the rest of the month. Twenty years later, at age sixty, the woman weighs twenty-one stone (294 pounds). Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans; Morgan.
M ‘‘MABEL’’ (1951). A short story, included in The Complete Short Stories, III. †George had been married to †Mabel for eight years. They became engaged when the former had been in England on leave from his post in Burma. By arrangement, she would join him in *Burma within six months, and they would be married. However, the death of Mabel’s father, the war, and George’s posting to an unsafe district delayed her arrival for seven years. Finally, the day comes for her to arrive in Rangoon, but suddenly George loses his nerve. He had not seen Mabel for seven years, had even forgotten what she looked like. Therefore, he literally jumps aboard a ship for *Singapore, but not before he leaves a letter for her, stating that he had been called away on business and that she should return to England. Mabel reacts by displaying a strong sense of perseverance and pursuing her elusive beau—to Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, *Hong Kong, Manilla, Shanghai, Yokohama, Hankow, Ichang, Chungking, and Cheng-tu. At the last place, the capital of Szechuan and 400 miles from Chungking, Mabel catches up with George. After her bath, she and George are married. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories, II. The World Over.
MACCARTHY, SIR CHARLES OTTO DESMOND (1877–1952). English writer and critic. Born at Plymouth, he received his education at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. Embarking upon a career in journalism, he eventually became editor of New Quarterly and Eye Witness (later New Witness). By 1913, he had joined The New Statesman, first as writer, then (1920) literary editor (to 1927) and drama critic. He moved on to become editor of Life and Letters (1928–1933), book reviewer for The Sunday Times (1928– 1952), and a respected broadcaster. The Crown conferred knighthood upon him in 1951.
MACKENZIE, SIR EDWARD MONTAGUE COMPTON
143
MacCarthy published his collected criticism in The Court Theatre (1904– 1907), Portraits (1931), Experience (1935), Drama (1940), Shaw (1951), and the posthumous works Humanities (1954) and Theatre (1955). MacCarthy’s literary friends in London had always hoped that he would become a great novelist, but the critic never rose to that occasion. *Maugham and MacCarthy met sometime in October 1914, when both served in the same Red Cross ambulance unit at Boulogne. They ate together, shared the same billet, and essentially became friends. To MacCarthy must go the credit both for labeling Maugham ‘‘the English Maupassant’’ and for embarking (1920) upon a campaign to persuade critics and readers that Maugham deserved consideration as a major literary figure. However, despite their friendship, MacCarthy could look upon Maugham’s work objectively. Thus, in August 1920, he branded the play *The Unknown as a failure and then three years later, after seeing *Our Betters on the London stage, admitted that Maugham’s work improved with every passing day. The critic thought *For Services Rendered (1932) to have been his best play. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); DNB; Drabble; MacCarthy, Experiences; MacCarthy (1933/1934/1977; 1935; 1953); Morgan.
MACKENZIE, SIR EDWARD MONTAGUE COMPTON (1883–1972). English miscellaneous writer (travel, biography, essay, poetry, fiction, journalism), born at West Hartlepool, County Durham, the son of the actor Edward Compton (1854–1918) and brother of the actress Fay Compton (1894–1978). Following his education at St. Paul’s School and Magdalen College, Oxford, MacKenzie traveled about Capri, the Channel Islands, and Scotland—areas that provided settings for his fiction. During World War I, he served in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign and in 1917 became director of the Aegean Intelligence Service in Syria. His novels include Carnival (1912), the two-volume Sinister Street (1913–1914), Guy and Pauline (1915), Vestal Fire (1927), Extraordinary Women (1928), The Four Winds of Love (1937–1945), Whisky Galore (1947), and Thin Ice (1956). He also published two volumes of war memoirs, Gallipoli Memories (1929) and Greek Memories (1932), as well as the ten autobiographical ‘‘Octaves’’ of My Life and Times (1963–1971). Prior to World War I, MacKenzie—with Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), and *Rebecca West (1892–1983)—stood at the center of a group of writers known as Les Jeunes. He lived in *Scotland after 1928, being knighted in 1951. *Maugham knew Compton MacKenzie through his association with his old homosexual friend *John Ellingam Brooks and other of the homosexual expatriates on Capri who had gathered there between 1895 (*Oscar Wilde’s trial) and the turn of the century. Years later, MacKenzie became terribly angry after Maugham, in his autobiographical essay *The Summing Up (1938), called Brooks a sham and a lie for having wasted his life and his talent. In 1954, when *Heinemann commissioned Jocelyn Brooke to assemble a Festschrift in honor
144
‘‘MACKINTOSH’’
of Maugham’s eightieth birthday, MacKenzie proved one of those writers who declined to contribute. Nonetheless, the two lived fairly close to each other on the French Riviera and sustained a long and fairly friendly relationship. Critically, one can uncover exercises identifying parallels, relationships, and comparisons between such Maugham novels as *Of Human Bondage (1915) and *The Razor’s Edge (1944) with MacKenzie’s Sinister Street (1913–1914). Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
‘‘MACKINTOSH’’ (1920). A short story, published initially in 1920 and included in the collection *The Trembling of a Leaf (1921). Set at Talua (Savaii), the largest island of the Western Samoa archipelago, this strongly psychological piece concerns the clash between †Walker, the island administrator for the past twenty-five years, and his assistant, †Mackintosh, a native of Aberdeen who has held the post for two years. Walker and Mackintosh are unable to bridge the distance between their unlikely compositions and temperaments. At age sixty— short, excessively stout, a grotesque figure of fun, and grossly illiterate—the administrator pawns most of his paperwork on the thirty-six-year-old Mackintosh. His main concern appears to be satisfying his passion for the completion of roads. As *Maugham tells us early, ‘‘[T]he two men were not made to get on.’’ Against Walker’s total disorganization, drunkenness, lewdness, and cunning stand Mackintosh’s exactness, morality, and sobriety. The assistant hates his superior to such a degree that he coldly begins to plot the means of ridding the world of the obese and cruel Walker. By allowing a disgruntled native, †Manuma, the son of Chief †Tangatu, to steal his revolver, he manipulates the boy into killing Walker. Although technically not guilty of murder, for, eventually, Manuma would have done the deed by some means or another, Mackintosh suffers to such an extent from a guilty conscience that, almost immediately after Walker’s death, he takes his own life. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Trembling of a Leaf; Cordell; Morgan; Mortimer.
MADEMOISELLE ZAMPA (1904). A one-act farce produced as a curtainraiser for *Maugham’s play *A Man of Honour for its performance at the Avenue Theatre, London, on 18 February 1904. It was never published. See ‘‘A REHEARSAL.’’ Bibliography: Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Whitehead.
THE MAGICIAN (1908). A novel, written during the summer of 1905, published (November 1908) in London by *William Heinemann and in New York (1909) by Duffield; reprinted by Arno Press (New York, 1977) and Penguin Books (London, 1978). *Maugham based this novel partly upon the life of, and legends surrounding, Edward Alexander (Aleister) Crowley (1875–1947), the self-described religious prophet and satanist whom he had met at Le Chat Blanc
THE MAGICIAN
145
in Paris in 1904. Crowley, upon discovering himself as †Oliver Haddo in the novel, proved not to be amused and accused Maugham of plagiarism. Two others of the Chat Blanc group make token appearances in The Magician: the drunken Canadian painter James Wilson Morrice as †Warren, the very nearly great painter and delightful interpreter of Paris; and *Roderick O’Conor (who, seven years later, will have a slightly larger role in *Of Human Bondage) as †O’Brien, the Irish painter who, as a failure, can forgive no one who succeeds. As usual, Maugham attempted to seize the moment by riding the wave of contemporary fashion and interest in the occult. Methuen and Company first accepted the manuscript and even advanced Maugham seventy-five pounds; however, one of the partners of the firm stopped publication after he had read it, and William Heinemann eventually produced the piece. Maugham himself disliked the novel and refused to have it reprinted during his lifetime. Critics generally choose to ignore it, principally because its plot, characters, and events (with the exceptions of the Paris cafe´ scenes) appear forced and terribly implausible. Although Maugham offers us several major characters in The Magician, the character of the title, Oliver Haddo, literally and figuratively dominates the piece. Vastly obese and with a paunch of imposing dimensions and the look of a wicked, sensual priest, Haddo had been educated at Eton and Oxford, where he developed a reputation for athletics and eccentricity. There he met †Dr. Frank Hurrell, currently assistant physician at St. Luke’s Hospital, London. Haddo claims intimate friendship with Hurrell, but the latter despises him and warns a colleague, †Arthur Burdon, to avoid Haddo like the plague. For his part, Burdon, a twenty-six-year-old distinguished surgeon at St. Luke’s, has little interest outside his profession other than golf and †Margaret Dauncey, seven years younger than he, to whom he has been engaged for the past two years. The beautiful and innocent Margaret has, for the past two years, been studying art at Colarossi’s art academy, Paris, while sharing a flat off the Boulevard du Montparnasse with †Susie Boyd, her thirty-year-old former schoolmistress. Susie has inherited money from a distant relative, which has allowed her to leave her position and, with Margaret, pursue art at Colarossi’s academy. Connected by various degrees to each of those characters stands the fragile, stooped, and sallow figure of †Dr. Porhoet, a native of Brittany. He has spent the best part of his life practicing medicine in *Egypt, where he knew Arthur Burdon’s father and Arthur (who had been born there). A necromancer and one interested in the oddities of mankind, Porhoet had met Oliver Haddo at the Arsenel Library, Paris, where both studied the old alchemists—a subject upon which Porhoet has recently published a book. Thus, when Arthur Burdon comes to Paris to study the methods of French surgeons, he contacts Porheot; through Burdon, Porhoet meets Margaret and Susie (who eventually falls in love with Arthur). When the four by chance stumble upon Haddo at a Paris cafe´ called Le Chien Noir, he and Porhoet recall each other. Before embarking upon the narrative proper, one needs, momentarily, to take
146
‘‘MAKING OF A MILLIONAIRE’’
stock of Haddo’s parentage, which serves to underscore the critics’ attacks upon the novel. The elder †Haddo, a speculator, had always been unlucky in his profession. He lost his speech shortly before he died. A year later, his son called him from the grave to convey his dying words. The father advised his son to purchase a stock that, in the end, did poorly. †Mrs. Haddo, not surprisingly, has been in an asylum for the past twenty-five years. Her great stature, revolting and excessive corpulence, huge, impassive face, and disheveled and scanty hair bear an appalling likeness to her son. At any rate, the plot of the novel goes forward when Burdon later insults Haddo, and the evil one seeks revenge by determining to take Margaret away from him. As a competent hypnotist, that proves no problem for Haddo, and Margaret marries him. Although at one point Arthur manages to hustle her away from Haddo and harbor her with Susie Boyd in a cottage in Hampshire opposite the Isle of Wight, she suddenly leaves and returns to her husband at the Haddos’ gothic family estate at Skene, Staffordshire. Arthur then returns to London, where he tries to forget Margaret by immersing himself in his practice and editing a long work on surgery. He loses weight, becomes unbalanced and neurotic, and festers under the notion of Margaret’s being in great danger. At Skene, Haddo engages in the practice of producing †Homunculi, male and female forms initially created by the old alchemists in which life becomes manifest. During that time, Margaret dies, and Haddo buries her at Skene. Arthur pleads with Dr. Porhoet to raise Margaret’s spirit to confirm the surgeon’s belief that Haddo had murdered her. Porhoet does so, and Arthur realizes that his suspicions have been justified. In the meantime, Haddo’s corpulence has become a positive disease; every one of his features sinks into a hideous obesity, and he dies from sheer suffocation. Then, Arthur Burdon sets fire to his house, seemingly bringing an end to the entire affair. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cowley; Curtis (1974); Curtis and Whitehead; Morgan; Ross; Viswanath.
‘‘MAKING OF A MILLIONAIRE’’ (1906). A short story published initially in 1906 but not included in any of the collections of *Maugham’s short stories. †Frederick Rose, a retired soldier, had, twenty years earlier, been prosecuted on a swindling charge, only narrowly escaping a term in prison. He has made a fortune on the Stock Exchange and currently has involved himself in a gigantic fraud, selling shares in the supposedly worthless New-Lyons Mine. His wife, †Betty Rose, threatens to leave Frederick if he does not buy back all of the shares in the mine, thus preventing the fraud. Further, the Roses’ handsome, athletic, and Oxford educated son, †Leslie, engaged to marry †Janet Blissard, threatens to leave for America if Frederick does not buy back all of the NewLyons shares. In the interim, Janet’s father, †Colonel Blissard, seen as an important person in Shropshire, has refused to nominate Leslie Rose for membership in Gann’s, a London club, nor will he allow Janet to marry young
THE MAKING OF A SAINT: A ROMANCE OF MEDIEVAL ITALY
147
Rose. However, the New-Lyons Mine proves legitimate, Frederick becomes a millionaire, and Colonel Blissard nominates Leslie to Gann’s and agrees to the marriage. Money heals all wounds and repairs all rifts. Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories.
THE MAKING OF A SAINT: A ROMANCE OF MEDIEVAL ITALY (1898). A historical novel published in London (1898) by *T. Fisher Unwin, who printed 2,000 copies to sell at six shillings, and at Boston (1898) by L. C. Page and Company; reprinted in New York by Farrar Straus in 1966 and again in New York by Arno Press, 1977. *Maugham’s first book to be published in the United States. Page, who purchased the American rights for forty pounds, printed 2,000 copies to sell for $1.50. Maugham funneled his plot through the ‘‘memoirs’’ of the narrator, †Filippo Brandolini, a fifteenth-century Italian soldier of fortune, citizen of Castello, who eventually becomes a brother of the Order of St. Francis of Assisi at Campomassa and then is elevated to sainthood as Beato Giuliana. The actual events had been imaginatively extracted from Niccolo Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories (1532), particularly the account of †Caterina Sforza and the insurrection at Forli in 1487. Brandolini becomes involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the ruler of Forli and take command of the city. Woven through the narrative, one finds an ample supply of the accoutrements that accompany such activity: duels, battles, rioting, sieges, looting, hanging, assassinations, children taken hostage, affairs, betrayals, and public executions. Filippo’s relations with the beautiful but deceptive twenty-three-year-old †Giulia Dall’Aste and the handsome, voluptuous, massive, and equally attractive †Claudia Piacentini represent Maugham’s portrayal of a passion and fluctuating love that one cannot totally conquer, a theme that will rear its head in other of his novels and plays. Complicating the issue is the political trauma of the moment. Filippo suggests to †Checco d’Orsi and to his cousin, †Matteo d’Orsi, the need to assassinate †Girolamo Riario, the leader of Forli. Checco then sends Filippo to Florence to transact commercial business with †Lorenzo de Medici, at which point Lorenzo dispenses political advice and ideals. After the actual insurrection against Girolamo, he remains at Forli after the other conspirators escape, essentially to take care of the ancient family patriarch, †Count Orso d’Orsi. Disguised as a servant (sans beard, mustache, and long locks), he struggles unsuccessfully to defend Orso from the mob, who knock him unconscious in the process. †Andrea and †Pietro, two stewards, rescue Filippo and take him to the house of Andrea’s mother. At that point, Filippo rekindles his love for Giulia Dall’Aste; the two escape from Forli and reach Citta di Castello, where they find Checco d’Orsi and, three days after their arrival, marry. Filippo accompanies Checco to Rome, remains there for three months, and upon returning to Citta di Castello, discovers that Giulia has been unfaithful. She has been involved in an affair with a distant cousin, †Giorgio Dall’Aste, reportedly the
148
MALVOLEON, BLUEY
only lover that Giulia has kept for more than ten days. Filippo kills Giorgio, after which Giulia’s father, †Bartolomeo Moratini, and brothers, †Allesandro and †Scipione, murder her. Filippo then leaves Citta di Castello and on the road meets †Ercole Piacentini, Claudia’s husband and Girolamo Riario loyalist. Filippo bests him in a sword fight at an inn but cannot kill him. Finally, Filippo becomes the poor monk Giuliano—his hair white as snow, eyes dim and sunken, cheeks hollow, skin ashy and wrinkled. He loses his teeth and becomes old, bent, and weak. Maugham also concerns himself with large, universal political issues that he veils under thin Renaissance masks. Checco d’Orsi, the leader of the insurrection against the tyrant Girolamo Riario, had initially helped Girolamo overthrow his tyrannical predecessor; now Checco must serve a despotic master whom he helped to create. His fellow conspirators persuade Checco to murder Girolamo in the name of liberty and for the sake of national freedom, an idea and literary event dating from Shakespeare. Checco emerges as liberator and hero, but the mob turns on him and drives his faction from the city, and the revolution essentially fails. The conspirators’ reward for their idealism appears limited to bitter exile, surrounded by disillusion and pessimism. The critical reception to all of this focused upon the blinds that Maugham had drawn down upon his imagination. Choosing to anchor the novel to Machiavelli’s historical fact and to Shakespeare’s political conservatism (see Julius Caesar as but one example), he had little room to fill the piece with fresh juices from his own creative caldron. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1974); Curtis and Whitehead; Morgan; Viswanath.
MALVOLEON, BLUEY (fl. 1940–1980). In June 1963, Camilla Paravicini (b.1941), *Maugham’s granddaughter and the daughter of *Liza Maugham and her first husband, *Vincent Paravicini, married the young Malvoleon, heir to a Greek shipping firm. The physically and mentally infirm Maugham did not attend the wedding; perhaps he was not even invited. Bibliography: Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
‘‘MAN AND WIFE.’’ See under PENELOPE. ‘‘A MAN FROM GLASGOW’’ (1947). A short story included in *Creatures of Circumstance. The †Narrator, at dinner in a modest hotel in Algeciras, meets †Robert Morrison, a Scot from Glasgow who has been a longtime employee of the Glasgow and South of Spain Olive Company, Limited. He had been living on the firm’s estate outside the village of San Lorenzo, near Ecija, *Spain. One terribly hot and sleepless night, out on the veranda, Morrison hears the sound of a human voice laughing, seeming to come from the olive fields. The laughter then changes to shrill cries, then to a groan, then gives way to silence. The next
A MAN OF HONOUR. A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS
149
morning, Morrison discovers the presence of a small white house next to the estate; Both †Jose, one of the olive company employees, and his friend †Fernandez tell him that the former occupants of the house had included a madman, his brother, and a servant. The madman had been dead for twenty years. A month later, at the next full moon, Morrison again hears the laughter, followed by shrieks and sobs. Determined to discover the source of the phenomenon, Morrison, at the next full moon, does not go to sleep but sits in readiness. Upon hearing the laughter, he rushes to the white house and bursts inside, finding the room where the laughter and groans appear to have originated. Upon entering that room, he discovers it to be empty. Four weeks later, he again hears the same sounds, but Fernandez, who waits with him, does not. Morrison later hears the sounds in Saville, sixty miles away. Sheer terror has taken over his mind and his conscience. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance.
A MAN OF HONOUR. A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS (1903). *Maugham’s first full-length play, completed in Rome in 1898 and the first to appear on the English stage. Produced by the Stage Society at the Imperial Theatre, Westminster, London, on 22 February 1903, starring Harley Granville Barker (1877– 1946) and running for only two evening performances and a matinee. Students at Cambridge University presented a version in that same year. A commercial revival (with a significantly different conclusion) came forward on 18 February 1904, at the Avenue Theatre, London, starring Muriel Wylford and Ben Webster (1864–1947), which ran for twenty-eight performances. Maugham published the play in London with Chapman and Hall (1903) and dedicated it to his artist friend *Gerald Kelly, while in Chicago, Dramatic Publishing Company issued it in 1912. W. L. Courtney, a member of the selection committee of the Stage Society, printed 150 copies to be sold on opening night, then published it as a supplement to the Fortnightly Review, which he edited, in March 1902. †Basil Kent, a twenty-six-year-old decorated Boer War hero, barrister, and writer finds himself attracted to, and involved in an affair with, †Jenny Bush, a pretty barmaid at the Golden Crown, Fleet Street, London. When she becomes pregnant, he marries her out of a strong sense of honor. However, Basil quickly finds himself in a humiliating trap. The child is stillborn; Basil finds he has nothing in common with Jennie and her lower-class family. Her brother, †James Bush, a distinctly vulgar Cockney, works as an auctioneer’s clerk and has involved himself in a number of shady schemes, looking for money wherever he can find it. †Mrs. Bush, the equally vulgar mother of Jenny and James, becomes the recipient of Basil Kent’s furniture after the death of her daughter. Even more frustrating, Basil loves †Hilda Murray, a tall and handsome widow of a wealthy army officer, with whom he shares both social standing and interests. Hilda, in turn, loves Basil and must fend off the marriage proposals of
150
‘‘A MAN WITH A CONSCIENCE’’
†Robert Brackley, a forty-year-old poet who would have received the laureate had not that honor been abolished after the death of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Following a heated quarrel with Jenny, in which Basil asks for a divorce, he goes off to see Hilda, and Jennie follows. Discovering the relationship between her husband and Hilda and realizing that Basil does not love her, Jenny then drowns herself off the Thames embankment. After his friend †John Halliwell, Hilda Murray’s brother-in-law, tells Basil of the tragedy, the latter enters into a brief period of grief, but that ends when he decides to grasp firmly onto life and enjoy what he has left of it. He reasons that he indeed acted in an honorable and gentlemanly manner, but duty brought him only misery and tragedy. In the end, he and Hilda embrace as the coroner enters. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Curtis and Whitehead; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
‘‘A MAN WITH A CONSCIENCE’’ (1939). A short story published initially in 1939 and included in the collection *The Mixture As Before (1940). †The Narrator, on the penal colony island of St. Laurent de Maroni, Guiana, meets a convict, †Jean Charvin. Born at Le Havre, Charvin works in the accountant’s department at the penal colony and has six years of his sentence remaining. He comes from a decent family, his father being employed in the Customs Service; possessed of an excellent education, he has completed his military service and had formerly been an accountant at a large exporting house. His only fault seems to have been that he murdered his wife. Charvin tells the Narrator of his friend †Henri Renard, a lighthearted person who enjoyed his leisure and went by the name Riri. The two were inseparable companions at Le Havre, and Henri’s father also held an office in the Customs Service. Riri and Jean both meet and fall in love with †Marie Louise Meurice, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a captain in the colonial army, now dead. She initially chooses to marry Riri, yet that event promises never to occur, since Riri must emigrate to Cambodia to obtain a job, and Marie Louise refuses to leave France. Jean Charvin now sees the opportunity to marry Marie Louise. However, Riri suddenly finds himself in line for a position with a company in *France, and Charvin is called in to provide a reference for him. The temptation proves too great: Charvin lies about Riri’s integrity; the latter does not get the position, and a month later he sails for Cambodia. Six months following that, Charvin and Marie Louise marry. After a year of marriage, Charvin realizes that his wife has absolutely no depth of soul or intelligence. When Riri dies from typhoid fever, Charvin feels responsible for his death. The morning after he and Marie Louise attend a party celebrating the marriage of Riri’s sister, Marie Louise makes a stupid remark about †Madame Renard’s dress, which infuriates Charvin. Reacting to her remark, her close-cropped hair, and her powdered face, he clubs her over the head, breaking her skull. Once inside the penal colony, however, his guilt over Riri’s death subsides. He comes
‘‘A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE’’
151
to believe that the murder of his wife and the succeeding six-year sentence have proven ample compensation for Riri’s death. ‘‘ ‘But the next time I marry,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I shan’t marry for love, I shall marry for money.’ ’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Mixture As Before.
‘‘THE MAN WITH A SCAR’’ (1925). Published initially in 1925 and included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). †The Narrator, at the Palace Hotel in Guatemala City, comes across the †General, a man with a broad red scar that runs in a crescent from his temple to his chin. He earns his living by selling lottery tickets. He is a ruffian, bandit, and former revolutionary general from Nicaragua who, with five others, once faced execution by a government firing squad. When the officer in charge of that exercise, †General San Ignacio, asks the condemned men for their last requests, the man with the scar wants to say good-bye to his wife. The †Woman in question arrives, and when the two embrace, the husband stabs her in the neck, stating that he did so because he loved her. San Ignacio is so overwhelmed by such a noble gesture that he pardons the man with the scar. The Narrator listens to that story from a †Man at the bar; when the former asks him how the General received the scar, the Man replies, ‘‘Oh, that was due to a bottle that burst when I was opening it. A bottle of ginger ale.’’ Bibliography: Collected Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
‘‘A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE’’ (1906, 1908). Originally written in 1906, rewritten in 1908, and published in the second volume of the Complete Short Stories. On board a shabby ship out of Bangkok, the †Narrator surveys an odd collection of persons, headed by an American named †Wilkins, who for twenty years had been traveling up and down the East from Port Said to Yokohama as the proprietor of a circus. His wife, †Mrs. Wilkins, appears as short and as fat as her husband. Both are always eager to discuss their family, comprising essentially monkeys and less humanlike creatures. They are joined by a French official known only as †Monsieur le Gouvernour, accompanied by his large and robust †Wife. An †Italian Tenor completes the major players in the group. Halfway through the story, the Gouvernour relates the story of his marriage. At age forty-nine, he had been offered the governorship of one of the colonies, but only upon the condition that he marry. That he must do within a month’s time. He places an advertisement for a wife in Figaro and receives 4,372 responses, complete with photographs. In despair, he accidentally meets a †Friend and tells him his tale. The Friend suggests that the Gouvernour-nominee go to Geneva, *Switzerland, and place his proposal, with a box of chocolates, before his cousin, a suitable spinster. He finds the woman handsome and delightful and proposes, and she accepts. Within a fortnight they become man and wife, and the new Gouvernour assumes his position. The Moral: passion is not a proper
152
MARRIAGES ARE MADE IN HEAVEN
foundation for marriage; rather, for people to be happy in marriage, they must respect each other and must possess similar interests. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Seventeen Lost Stories.
MARRIAGES ARE MADE IN HEAVEN (1903). A one-act play written in 1896 that opened in Berlin, Germany, on 3 January 1902, under the title of Schiffbruchig (Shipwrecked). The Austrian-born Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) produced it for the Schall und Rauch (Rumor and Smoke), an avant-garde cabaret theater on Unter den Linden; it ran for eight performances, then five more in April and May of the same year. Although never performed in London, it appeared in English in 1903 as Marriages Are Made in Heaven in the initial volume of The Venture Annual of Art and Literature (London: Pear Tree Press, 1903–1904), edited by Maugham and Laurence Housman (1865–1959). The short curtain-raiser underscores the prevailing influence of *Ibsen, *Wilde, and Pinero upon the young English playwrights of the period. †Lottie Vivyan, a handsome woman of twenty-eight who has consorted often with men, has received a settlement of £1,200 from her former lover, a †Lord Feaverham. She plans to marry †Jack Raynor, Oxford-educated but poor. A veteran of the Boer War, Jack has been a farmer, miner, and bartender. However, Jack’s friend and former school chum, †Herbert Paton, also a veteran of the Boer War, reveals Lottie’s past affairs and pleads with the couple not to enter into a marriage that will prove socially ruinous for them both. Jack responds that he realizes the source of Lottie’s income, but he will not part from her. From her viewpoint, Lottie Vivyan understands that respectability and virtue may well take their toll upon Jack and her, but time and good dinners will cause everyone to forget. Bibliography: A Traveller in Romance; Barnes; Curtis (1977); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
MARR-JOHNSON, DIANA JULIA MAUGHAM (1908–). Daughter of *Frederic Herbert Maugham (1866–1958), viscount Maugham of Hartfield, lord chancellor of England, and *Helen Mary Romer Maugham (d.1950); sister of *Robert (Robin) Romer Maugham (1916–1981), *Kate (Kittie) Mary Maugham Bruce (d.1961), and *Honor Betty Earl Maugham; niece of *William Somerset Maugham. Born in England, Diana Marr-Johnson received her education at King’s College, University of London, with a diploma in journalism. She married (1932) Kenneth Marr-Johnson, a chartered surveyor, with whom she had three sons (Frederick, Simon, and William). Her early fiction, under the name Diana Maugham, includes Rhapsody in Gold (1935), Bella North (1954), and Goodnight Pelican (1957); Face of a Stranger (1963), Faces My Fortune (1970), and Take a Golden Spoon (1972) bear her full name below the titles. She published a play, Never Say Die (1958), and a three-act comedy, Marriage Unlimited, opened at the Richmond Theatre, London, in March 1971. Diana appears not to have been particularly close with her uncle, even though
MARSH, SIR EDWARD
153
she proved one of the few persons in Maugham’s family who thought well of his secretary/companion the often obnoxious *Gerald Haxton. Her husband, Kenneth Marr-Johnson, on the other hand, viewed Gerald as unpleasant and inherently evil, referring to him as ‘‘the black bishop.’’ In reference to unpleasantness, spending a short visit with her uncle at *Villa Mauresque in summer 1962, Diana could only describe the often senile old man as ‘‘like Lear raving on the bench,’’ a striking contrast to the Eden-like atmosphere that she associated with Maugham and his estate during the 1930s and 1950s. Bibliography: Contemporary Authors, 13–14R; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MARSH, SIR EDWARD (1872–1953). English classicist, scholar, patron of poetry and painting, and civil servant. After completing his formal education at Cambridge, Marsh joined the civil service and served, at various times, as secretary to principal ministers. Among others, his associations included Herbert Henry Asquith (1852–1928) during his term as chancellor of the exchequer (1905–1908); *Winston Churchill (1974–1965) when he served as home secretary (1910–1911); and Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) when he served as chancellor of the exchequer (1923–1924). He retired from government service in 1937. Marsh had early become one of the earlier promoters of *Henrik Ibsen’s plays in England, then turned his attention to his friend, the poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), for whom he functioned as executor. Between 1912 and 1922, Marsh edited five volumes of Georgian Poetry and also (1918) edited Brooke’s Collected Poems (including a ‘‘Memoir’’ of the poet). He translated classical and French writers, and in 1939 he published A Number of People, reminiscences of his friends in the literary and political worlds. However, Marsh’s most important contributions to literature came in the form of the service he performed for writers, and thus his connection with *Maugham. Simply, he represented one of the few people in the history of literature to have enjoyed correcting and editing proofs. Although Maugham had met Marsh briefly at the War Office prior to World War I, their relationship began in late 1934, during which one of Marsh’s projects concerned correcting proofs for Churchill’s forthcoming History of the English Speaking Peoples (the first volume of which did not reach the press until 1956). Between 1935, with the publication of the travel book Don Fernando, and 1953, when Maugham completed his essay collection *The Vagrant Mood (and Marsh died), Marsh corrected, edited, and commented upon the manuscripts and proofs of fourteen Maugham books (see Morgan, p. 415, for some specific examples of Marsh’s comments and reactions). He focused upon punctuation, grammar, style, and accuracy of fact—and he did it all at absolutely no cost to the writer. Indeed, Marsh’s enjoyment of such tasks can best be appreciated by contrasting it to Maugham’s utter distaste for the exercise. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); DNB; Drabble; Hassall; Robin Maugham (1978); Morgan.
154
MARSHALL, HERBERT
MARSHALL, HERBERT (1890–1966). British actor, born in London and known primarily for his urbane roles. He began his stage career in 1913; from 1927, in Mumsie, through 1965, in The Third Day, he concentrated principally on motion pictures. He served in World War I and suffered the loss of a leg. Marshall’s more noteworthy film appearances came in Murder (1928), Trouble in Paradise (1932), I Was a Spy (1933), The Dark Angel (1936), The Little Foxes (1941), Forever and a Day (1943), The Enchanted Cottage (1944), Duel in the Sun (1946), High Wall (1948), The Black Shield of Falworth (1954), and The Virgin Queen (1955). However, Marshall’s name has always been connected with *Somerset Maugham, particularly since the actor portrayed the writer (or †Narrator) in the Twentieth-Century Fox film version (1946) of *The Razor’s Edge (1944). Prior to that, he had appeared in both film versions of The Letter (1927)—in 1929 with *Jeanne Eagels (1894–1929) and in 1940 with Bette Davis (1908–1989). Then, with another suave British actor, George Sanders (1906–1972), Marshall appeared in the 1942 United Artist production of *The Moon and Sixpence (1919). Bibliography: Halliwell; Morgan.
MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS. *Maugham’s association with Martha’s Vineyard, the summer resort island off the southwest coast of Cape Cod, came initially in 1942, when he decided to spend from July through part of September at Edgartown. Simply, he wanted to bathe and to work undisturbed at the Colonial Inn on the forthcoming volume of English and American literature that he had been preparing for Doubleday. There he met social and literary critic Max Eastman (1883–1969) and actress *Katharine Cornell (1893–1974). He returned in June 1943, again to the Colonial Inn, to continue work on *The Razor’s Edge, which he finished by the middle of August. Finally, in August 1944, after depositing the tubercular and dying *Gerald Haxton in the New England Baptist Hospital, Boston, Maugham went directly to Edgartown for rest, which included bathing and bridge playing. Bibliography: Morgan; Webster’s.
MARTI-IBANEZ, FELIX (1912?–1972). A Spanish psychiatrist living in New York with whom *Maugham frequently corresponded. The strange but interesting Marti-Ibanez had come to the United States in 1939, following the Spanish civil war. Supposedly, during the campaign in South Ebro, he had been wounded in the arm and scalp and thus took refuge in a bombed house in the village of Torre del Espanol. There he found a volume of Maugham’s short stories, which he likened to the prose of Cervantes. In 1941, Marti-Ibanez wrote two articles on Maugham’s travel book *Don Fernando (1935) and sent them, along with original short stories, to Maugham for criticism. The latter dismissed the fiction as propaganda.
‘‘MASTERSON’’
155
However, Maugham did ask Marti-Ibanez to edit his last novel, *Catalina (1948), set in Spain during the Inquisition, for historical accuracy. In accepting the task, the Spanish psychiatrist enclosed an article he had written drawing analogies between chess and the Oedipus complex. The two met in New York City in December 1948 or January 1949, as Maugham wanted to confer with Marti-Ibanez about the latter’s translation of Catalina into Spanish. Bibliography: Contemporary Authors, 33–36R; Morgan.
THE MASK AND THE FACE. A SATIRE IN THREE ACTS (1933). An unpublished play, being *Maugham’s adaptation of a popular comedy, La Maschera e il Volto (1913, 1916), by the Italian representative of the teatro grottesco, Luigi Chiarelli (1884–1947). Originally produced in New York by the Theatre Guild at the Fifty-second Street Theatre on 8 May 1933, it never went on the London stage, nor did Maugham ever publish it. Set on Lake Como, the piece spins itself around a number of absurd love relationships, situations to which Maugham must certainly have been attracted. †Count Paolo Grazia, husband of the attractive †Savina Grazia, proves to be extremely jealous, claiming that a man who pardons infidelity must resort to suicide. He further maintains that he would kill his wife if he found her to have been unfaithful to him. However, when Paolo believes that he has caught Savina in an affair with his lawyer, †Luciano Spina, he lacks the determination either to strangle Savina or to kill himself. Instead, he orders her to go abroad and to change her name. A body is then discovered in the lake, and everyone believes it to be Savina. Paolo stands trial for the murder of his wife (although she is very much alive). Through the efforts of Spina, the jury acquits Paolo, the very much alive Savina returns from abroad, the two reconcile, and Luciano marries †Marta Setta, to whom he had initially been engaged. Then there exists the situation of †Cirillo Zanotti, a cynical, philosophical, and elderly banker. His wife, †Elisa Zanotti, considerably younger than her husband, flirts with a sculptor, †Giorgio Alamari, and complains about her husband’s kindness. She would prefer to be terrorized by a jealous husband, such as Paolo Grazia, but at the same time she is sharply repulsed by Paolo. Although Cirillo overhears the flirtatious exchanges between Elisa and Giorgio and becomes angry, he and his wife manage a reconciliation. Finally, one may note the affair of †Wanda Serini, the young niece of Cirillo Zanotti. She is engaged to †Piero Pucci, who really loves her, but he releases her to marry her true love, †Mario Miliotti. Bibliography: Curtis; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b).
‘‘MASTERSON’’ (1929, 1951). A short story written in 1929 and included in the 1951 edition of The Complete Stories. †Masterson, originally from Cheltenham and a resident of Thazi, meets the †Narrator at the club in Mandalay. Masterson spends most of the year traveling up and down *Burma on business
156
MATISSE, HENRI EMILE BENOIT
but spends all of his spare money buying Burmese curiosities. He invites the Narrator to his house for brunch, where he shows him his collection. Among the items, they come across the framed photograph of a ravishing young †Burmese Girl, Masterson’s mistress for five years and the mother of their three children (one of whom had died at age six weeks). She has not lived with Masterson for the past four months. She had been an excellent housekeeper and an even better bridge player. Then, the Burmese Girl asked Masterson to marry her legally. He believed that the request merely constituted a whim of hers, but she persisted, maintaining that at some point Masterson either would marry an English girl and throw her out or simply return to England and leave her behind. Masterson does not want to marry her, which means that he would lose his independence and his ability to return to Cheltenham once he retired. The Burmese Girl then leaves him, taking their children with her. At the end of the meal, when the Narrator must leave, Masterson apologizes to him for having bored him with his story. ‘‘ ‘Not at all,’ I said.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over.
MATISSE, HENRI EMILE BENOIT (1869–1954). French painter, born at Le Cateau, northern France. He studied law in Paris, then worked as a law clerk. While in his early twenties, he developed an interest in art, and in 1892 he attended classes at Paris—first at the Academie Julian, then at the Ecoles de Beaux Arts under Gustav Moreau (1826–1908). In 1904, he became the leader of a group of artists known as the Fauves (the wild beasts), who included Andre Derain (1880–1954), Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958), Raoul Dufy (1877– 1953), and *Georges Rouault (1871–1958). Although he painted several pictures under the influence of cubism, impressionism, and Cezanne, his most characteristic work reveals bold and brilliant areas of primary colors, organized within a rhythmic two-dimensional design. One can observe the purity of his line drawing in his sketches, book illustrations, etchings, and paintings. During the early 1930s, Matisse traveled in Europe and the United States; in 1949, he decorated a Dominican chapel at Venice. His work appears in the Tate Gallery, London, and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and New York. Early in 1950, *Maugham acquired Matisse’s Interieur au Parquet Grave, Femme Assise dans un Fauteuil Jaune for $10,000 from the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in New York City. At the London auction of Maugham’s paintings at Sotheby’s, on 10 April 1962, that piece sold for $106,400. He also owned the French painter’s The Lady with a Parasol. The painter and the writer met in 1951, both having houses within close proximity on the French Riviera. Although bedridden, Matisse continued to paint, and he asked Maugham to visit the chapel at Venice that he had designed and report on the progress of the work. At that time, Maugham bought his The Yellow Chair, amazed that he had finished it within the span of a single morning. Bibliography: Crystal; Morgan; Thorne.
MAUGHAM, ELIZABETH MARY [LIZA]
157
MAUGHAM, CHARLES ORMOND (1865–1958?). The second son, born in Paris to *Robert Ormond Maugham the younger (1823–1884) and *Edith Snell Maugham (1840–1882); older brother of *William Somerset Maugham. After being educated by an English governess and then at a lyce´e, he went off with his brothers *Frederic Herbert and *Henry Neville, to Dover College, Kent, where he became head prefect. After leaving Cambridge and studying for the law, he (as did his brother Henry Neville for a time) returned to Paris to take charge of the family finances and to help manage the legal office established there by their late father. He became a prominent lawyer and helped his brothers financially during their formative years. After retiring from practice, he lived in Lausanne before moving to London, where he spent his remaining years. As with all of the Maugham brothers, Charles suffered from severe attacks of melancholy. Bibliography: Cordell; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, DIANA. See under MARR-JOHNSON, DIANA JULIA. MAUGHAM, EDITH MARY SNELL (1840–1882). Mother of *Charles Ormond, *Frederic Herbert, *Henry Neville, and *William Somerset Maugham; wife of *Robert Ormond Maugham the younger (1823–1884). Small-boned, with delicate features, large brown eyes, and reddish gold hair, Edith Snell had been born in India, then from 1841, raised in France by her widowed mother, *Anne Alicia Todd Snell. She married Robert Ormond Maugham on 1 October 1863 at age twenty-three (her husband being forty). Between 1864 and 1882, she bore seven children, four of whom survived infancy. Despite being inflicted with consumption, Edith Maugham retained her beauty and social standing, being one of the few foreigners listed in the national directory of prominent Parisians, La Societe et le High Life. Further, she maintained a salon where political figures mingled with such artists as the novelist Prosper Merimee (1803–1870) and the painter Paul Gustave Dore (1832–1883). She died on 31 January 1882, six days after giving birth to a child who lived for only one day. Throughout his long life, the youngest of Edith Maugham’s surviving sons could never erase from his memory his mother’s fragile beauty nor the tragedy of her death. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Cordell; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, EDWARD ALAN (1882–1882). The last of seven children born to *Edith Mary Snell Maugham and *Robert Ormond Maugham the younger. He came into the world on 24 January 1882 and died on the following day. His mother passed away six days later. Bibliography: Morgan.
MAUGHAM, ELIZABETH MARY [LIZA] (1915–). Daughter and only child of *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome Maugham and *William Somerset Maugham,
158
MAUGHAM, ELIZABETH MARY [LIZA]
born in Rome on 1 September 1915, nineteen months before the marriage of her parents and named after the title character of Maugham’s first novel, *Liza of Lambeth (1897). While on the subject of naming, in 1925 Syrie built a house at Le Touquet, a fashionable beach resort in Normandy, and named it, of course, Maison Eliza. At any rate, throughout the twelve years of her parents’ marriage, Liza did not see much of her father, since he and Syrie went their separate ways, and the daughter remained under the care of her mother. ‘‘I have a notion,’’ justified Maugham in his travel book, *The Gentleman in the Parlour (1933), ‘‘that children are all the better for not being burdened with too much parental love’’ (p. 49). According to Liza, between 1927 and 1936, the year of her first marriage, she saw Maugham once each year for lunch at Claridge’s, London. In July 1933, more than a month from her eighteenth birthday, Liza Maugham enjoyed her coming-out party at her mother’s house in King’s Road, London, followed by a series of debutante dances that, according to the social critics of the day, existed as forms of marriage markets. On 24 July 1936, Liza married *Vincent Paravicini, the tall, athletic, and handsome son of the Swiss minister to England, at St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. Her father gave the bride away. The marriage produced a son, *Nicholas Somerset Paravicini (1937–), and a daughter, Camilla (1941–), who later married *Bluey Malvoleon. She spent most of World War II in the United States without her husband; Paravicini, having become a naturalized British citizen, had joined the British army at the outset of the war. Other than one or two trips to Hollywood, she kept her distance from Maugham, principally because of her aversion to *Gerald Haxton and his alcoholic conduct. By 1942, she held a position with the British Library of Information in New York, and in the summer of 1944, she returned to England with her children. She and Paravicini divorced in 1946, their marriage obviously not able to withstand the strain of a long wartime separation. On 21 July 1948, Liza married the politician *Lord John Hope, later Lord Glendevon. On 6 March 1950, she gave birth to their son, *Julian John Somerset Hope, while their second son, *Jonathan Charles, entered the world on 23 April 1951. Relations between Liza and her father did not improve, however. As Maugham became older and less stable, he fretted about having to leave his money and property to Lord John Hope (by way of Liza). Further, Maugham’s secretary/companion *Alan Searle did little to help matters, worrying that on Maugham’s death, everything would go to Liza and her family and nothing to him. Searle developed the tactic of telling Maugham damaging stories about Liza and her husband and then running off to Liza, pretending to take her side of an issue. Matters became even more strained in 1961, when Maugham decided to sell his valuable paintings, a number of which he had always intended would go to Liza. In fact, he had bought them in her name and sent the receipts directly to her. Following the sale in May 1962, Liza sued Sotheby’s for $648,900 of the total $1,466,864 received from the April auction of her father’s paintings, claiming the amount represented the nine pieces that she legally
MAUGHAM, FREDERIC HERBERT
159
owned. In late January 1964, the parties reached an out-of-court settlement whereby Liza would receive $250,000 and renounce all of her claims to Maugham’s estate. The rift between father and daughter widened even further with the newspaper serialization, during September–October 1962, of Maugham’s autobiographical *‘‘Looking Back’’ and its attacks upon the deceased Syrie Maugham. The sad relationship reached its fitting climax when Alan Searle finally got around to notifying Liza of her father’s death—a full twenty-four hours after its occurrence. She did, however, lead the funeral procession at the burying of Maugham’s ashes beneath the spires of Canterbury Cathedral. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Cordell; Robin Maugham (1978, 1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, ELLEN MARY MATTHEW (1845–?). The second wife of the Reverend *Henry MacDonald Maugham, vicar of All Saints Church, Whitstable, Kent, and aunt of *William Somerset Maugham. The jocular and merry daughter of a General Matthew of Bath, she married Rev. Maugham in 1894, at age fortynine, two years after the death of his first wife, Sophie. On 2 September 1897, William Somerset Maugham sent one of the presentation copies of his first novel, *Liza of Lambeth, to the vicarage with the inscription, ‘‘To the Vicar and Aunt Ellen, with the Author’s love.’’ Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Cordell; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, FREDERIC HERBERT (1866–1958). First Viscount Maugham of Hartfield and lord chancellor of England; *William Somerset Maugham’s older brother, husband of Helen Mary Romer Maugham (?–1950), and the father of *Robert (Robin) Romer Maugham (1916–1981), *Kate (Kittie) Mary Maugham Bruce (?–1961), *Diana Maugham Marr-Johnson (1908–), and *Honor Earl Maugham. The second of the four surviving sons of *Robert Ormond Maugham the younger (1823–1884) and *Edith Mary Snell Maugham (1840–1882), Frederic Herbert Maugham was born in Paris and educated there, first by English governesses, then at a lyce´e. With his brothers, *Charles Ormond and *Henry Neville, he went off to Dover College, Kent, which had been established in 1871 and whose students tended to be mostly the sons of army officers. From there, Frederic moved on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics. Unlike his youngest brother, Willie, Frederic Herbert excelled in athletics at Cambridge, particularly in rugby football and rowing, which prompted him to forsake the rigors of mathematics for the less demanding study of the law. Further, he proved himself an excellent speaker, becoming president of the Cambridge Union Debating Society in 1889. After being called (1890) to the bar at London, he chose Lincoln’s Inn, principally because of his Cambridge friendship with Mark Romer, the son of the noted jurist Sir Robert Romer (1840–1918). Six years later (1896), Maugham married Mark Romer’s sister, Helen Mary. By 1913, he had attached himself to
160
MAUGHAM, GWENDOLYN MAUDE SYRIE BARNARDO
the court of Justice Eve, and by 1928, with one of the largest practices at the bar, he received the appointment of judge in the Chancery Division of the High Court. He rose even further in the system when, in 1934, he gained promotion to the Court of Appeal and the Privy Council. In early 1938, Neville Chamberlain invited Maugham to become lord chancellor of England, a position he held until September 1939. Maugham’s publications included The Case of Jean Calas (1928), about an error in the French courts during 1761–1762 that had initially been exposed by Voltaire; The Tichburne Case (1936), a noted claims trial; The Truth about the Munich Crisis (1944), refuting the attacks upon Neville Chamberlain; U.N.O. and War Crimes (1951), in which he challenged the theory that the Charter of Nuremberg could ever have been justified by any rule of international law; and At the End of the Day (1954), a review of his own life and of public affairs in general (in which he mentions his brother Willie only twice). He was created Viscount Maugham in 1939. Although William Somerset Maugham respected Frederic’s achievements, he claimed to have detested him, most likely because they were such opposites. The older brother appeared to have been an extreme introvert, while failing to demonstrate affection toward his children and disapproving of his youngest brother’s lifestyle—particularly his marriage to a divorce´e and his living with male companions. Further, Frederic Herbert really believed that with the publication of *Liza of Lambeth (1897), young Willie had disgraced and betrayed his class. Frederic also attacked his brother’s longtime friend, *Winston Churchill, when the latter opposed Chamberlain’s appeasement policies on the eve of World War II. For his part, Willie Maugham viewed his brother as strange and difficult and at one point informed a visitor that Frederic stood as the model of †Dr. Walter Fane, the equally introverted (but nonetheless heroic) physician/ husband in his 1925 novel *The Painted Veil. However, Frederic proved a frequent visitor to his brother’s *Villa Mauresque on the French Riviera, the brothers corresponded frequently, and Willie felt a sincere sense of pride when his brother became lord chancellor of England—and, with that position, a peer for life. Therefore, at least the two appeared to tolerate each other, whether for short periods of personal contact or from long distances by mail. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; DNB; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan; Who Was Who, 1951–1960.
MAUGHAM, GWENDOLYN MAUDE SYRIE BARNARDO (1879–1955). The daughter (and one of seven children) of *Sara Louise (Syrie) Elmslie Barnardo (1842–1944) and *Dr. Thomas John Barnardo (1845–1905), the founder of the Barnardo homes for orphaned boys and girls and the best-known ‘‘dogooder’’ in England. Raised in Mossford Lodge, Essex, amid a host of orphaned children and strict paternal piety, young Syrie (nicknamed ‘‘Queenie’’ because of her beauty and fine figure) learned to play the organ for her father’s fund-
MAUGHAM, GWENDOLYN MAUDE SYRIE BARNARDO
161
raising activities in London churches, refrained from smoking and drinking, and read the Bible on Sundays. The family moved to the London suburb of Surbiton, and in 1901 Syrie went off with a group of tourists to Egypt. At Khartoum, she met *Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853–1936), the wealthy Wisconsin-born manufacturing chemist, patron of science, and founder of a pharmaceutical firm. On 25 June 1901, at age twenty-two, Syrie married the forty-eight-year-old Wellcome at St. Mark’s Church, Surbiton. The couple resided in Kent in a home they identified as ‘‘the Nest.’’ Their only son, Henry (b.1903), proved mentally ill, and the Wellcomes sent him to live with a family of dairy farmers near London. The marriage gradually deteriorated, perhaps because of age differences and Wellcome’s strong passion for domination and strict domestic organization. He accused Syrie of having a lover, and in September 1910, the couple signed a deed of separation. Wellcome settled £2,400 per year on Syrie, took custody of their son (who visited his mother in the summers), and never again saw his wife. Their divorce came in February 1916. Depending upon whom one consults, *Maugham met Syrie Wellcome in 1910 or 1911, when she had settled in a house in the fashionable Regent’s Park district of London, there pursuing her interest in interior decorating and in men. *Gordon Selfridge (1856–1947)—he, too, of Wisconsin birth and, by virtue of his famous London department store, wealthy—loomed as the most prominent among Syrie’s lovers. Maugham joined the group after the end of his affair with the actress *Ethelwyn Sylvia (Sue) Jones, and beginning late February 1914, they became lovers. Syrie wanted children and marriage, while Maugham thought little of either and hoped that any thought of divorce from Henry Wellcome would never become a reality. At any rate, their first attempt at a child resulted in miscarriage, after which Maugham went off to relax amid the comfort of his male companions on *Capri. Early in 1915, while in Flanders with his British army ambulance corps unit, Maugham received word of Syrie’s next pregnancy, and the writer took leave to return to London. To escape any publicity over the matter, he took Syrie off to Rome, worked on his play *Our Betters (1917), and, as the day of delivery approached, called in Syrie’s mother. Then, off he went again to Capri. However, when *Liza Maugham came into the world on 1 September 1915, by way of a cesarean section, Maugham was by Syrie’s side. He did not remain for long, however, and by the end of the month had gone off to *Switzerland on behalf of British Intelligence Service. In the meantime, Henry Wellcome, seriously intent on divorce, had hired detectives to uncover evidence of Syrie’s adultery; the latter responded by swallowing a large number of Veronal pills, an act that achieved little effect beyond frightening those close to her. At some point before the end of 1915, Maugham, sensing himself caught in an inescapable trap, had determined to marry Syrie after her divorce from Wellcome. That decision came as a result of the writer’s strict adherence to the Edwardian concept of gentlemanly conduct, rather than from any sincere feeling of love for Syrie. In truth, he was acting out the role that he himself had created more than
162
MAUGHAM, GWENDOLYN MAUDE SYRIE BARNARDO
a decade earlier in the form of †Basil Kent. Henry Wellcome won his divorce suit against Syrie in February 1916, with Maugham having been named as a corespondent in the court proceedings. The writer then returned to his espionage activities in Geneva. On 26 May 1917, in Jersey City, New Jersey, a state judge married thirty-seven-year-old Syrie Barnardo Wellcome and forty-three-year-old William Somerset Maugham. In the mind of Maugham’s friend *Glenway Wescott, Syrie believed that she had acquired a father for her child and an affluent and well-known writer for a husband; all Maugham wanted was an amiable, charming, and lively hostess for his after-play parties and to meet the demands of social conformity. What followed became a decade of incompatibility, unhappiness, and separation. Both knew of the other’s faults, weaknesses, and preferences; unfortunately, neither could really place the other in a positive light. Syrie could have accepted Maugham’s *homosexuality had his homosexual friends been less obnoxious. Maugham could have tolerated Syrie’s rage for fashion had she been more scrupulous, less extravagant, and less careless about money—particularly his money. However, not much evidence exists that the two could have ever compromised with each other or negotiated a common, middle-of-the-road lifestyle that would have at least been of benefit to their daughter. Despite brief periods of amicability at the outset of the union, the marriage simply should never have been. One must realize, however, that during the long periods of separation of wife from husband, Syrie did not sit about London and pine away the hours. By 1923, for example, riding the fad of the all-white look that she had championed, she had fairly well established a reputation as an interior decorator. House and Garden magazine had commissioned her to write articles on such subjects as ‘‘Framing Kakemono Pictures’’ and ‘‘Lighting the Piano.’’ Among her clients numbered such wealthy American families as the Astors and the Mellons. By 1925, she had earned sufficient capital to purchase property and to build a house at Le Touquet, in Normandy, *France. In honor of her daughter, she named it Maison Eliza. After her divorce, she opened a shop in New York City, extended her business, and generally employed the Maugham name to advantage. The end of the arrangement came in the fall of 1928, when Syrie filed a divorce petition in a French court; the final decree, originating from Nice on 11 May 1929, listed incompatibility as the grounds. The ignoble experiment cost Maugham one fully furnished house on King’s Road, London, a Rolls Royce motorcar, £2,400 pounds per year alimony, and £600 yearly for support of their daughter, Liza. Although probably glad to be rid of Syrie, Maugham really did not want the divorce. Aside from the expense, it stripped him of the facade of respectability that, no matter how thinly, served to cover his homosexual activities. Thus, although after 1928 the two saw each other only by accident or at necessary family occasions, the writer, until his death, harbored deep resentment against his former wife. Syrie became ill with a heart ailment in the spring of 1955 and, on 26 July of that year, in London, at age seventy-six, suffered a
MAUGHAM, HENRY MACDONALD, M.A.
163
heart attack and died. The death of his friend Mabel Alanson in the following month affected Maugham more. His single blow to Syrie’s memory came seven years later with the vicious attacks upon her in the serialized (Show, June– August 1962; Sunday Express, September–October 1962) version of his autobiographical *‘‘Looking Back.’’ His characterization of her as scatterbrained, snobbish, selfish, dishonest, promiscuous, and unscrupulous did little else but create a deep chasm between his daughter and him and alienate him from a number of friends. Bibliography: ‘‘She Started the Great White Way’’; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1977); Robin Maugham (1978, 1966); Morgan; Nichols; Stone.
MAUGHAM, HELEN MARY (?–1950). The only daughter and one of the six children of Sir Robert Romer (1840–1918) and Elizabeth (Betty) Lemon Romer (?–1916)—the daughter of Mark Lemon (1809–1870), a founder and the first editor of Punch magazine. In 1896, she married *Frederic Herbert Maugham (1866–1958), who would become lord chancellor of England and then Viscount Maugham of Hartfield, and subsequently became the mother of Diana MarrMaugham Johnson (1908–), *Robert (Robin) Cecil Romer Maugham (1916– 1981), *Kate (Kittie) Maugham Bruce (?–1961), and *Honor Earl Maugham. Helen Mary appears to have been among the relatively few relations whom her brother-in-law, *William Somerset Maugham, sincerely liked. He corresponded fairly regularly with her, and her diary contains interesting anecdotes of Maugham, particularly her observations of his reactions at the openings of his plays. Further, Maugham sent copies of all of his books to her. As did her husband, Helen Mary disapproved of the initial effort, *Liza of Lambeth (1897). She agreed with his brother *Frederic that Maugham had dipped too low into the social well for material and points of view, thus giving credence to immorality. Bibliography: DNB; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, HENRY MACDONALD, M.A. (1828–1897). Son of *Robert Ormond Maugham the elder (?–1862), younger brother of *Robert Ormond Maugham the younger (1823–1884), and thus *Somerset Maugham’s uncle (as well as uncle to *Frederic, *Charles, and *Henry Maugham). After functioning as curate in various towns in Surrey and Kent, Henry MacDonald Maugham served, from 1870 until his death, as vicar of the parish of the thirteenth-centuryold All Saints, Whitstable, Kent, on the coast and some six miles northwest of Canterbury. Maugham first married the German-born Sophie von Scheidlen (?– 1892), then Ellen Mary Matthew (1845–?) in 1894. Neither bore him children. Following the death of his father in 1884, the ten-year-old Somerset Maugham, with an income of approximately £150 per year, was sent to live with his Uncle Henry and *Aunt Sophie. If one relied solely upon Maugham’s fictional re-creation of his uncle (†Rev. William Carey) in *Of Human Bondage
164
MAUGHAM, HENRY (HARRY) NEVILLE
(1915), the portrait of Rev. Maugham would emerge as tainted with stupidity, stubbornness, stinginess, laziness, hypocrisy, and excessive rigidity. However, one must remember that the vicar of All Saints, Whitstable, at age fifty-six, set in his ways and without ever having raised a single child of his own, could not have been especially overjoyed at the idea of suddenly having to accommodate a ten-year-old boy who stuttered and who could hardly speak English. The fact that the boy brought with him an income sufficient to defray expenses could not have been that much padding with which to cushion the tremors to his regular and sedate provincial world. For his part, young William must have been equally uncomfortable: his parents both dead within less than two years, his brothers away at school, his French nurse dismissed immediately upon delivering the boy to his uncle’s vicarage, and the contrast between Paris, France, and Whitstable, Kent. However, as much discomfort that young Maugham might have endured or imagined, he never suffered any abuse or mistreatment at the hands of his guardian or either of his two wives. Indeed, sending one of his six presentation copies of *Liza of Lambeth (1897) to Whitstable vicarage with the inscription, ‘‘To the Vicar and Aunt Ellen, with the author’s love,’’ and his attendance (with brother Henry) at Henry MacDonald Maugham’s funeral, on 21 September 1897, serve to indicate that Maugham did not suffer totally from the experience. If he could not bring himself to call his guardian ‘‘Uncle Henry,’’ he could at least find the time to honor the man’s memory. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, HENRY (HARRY) NEVILLE (1868–1904). Son of *Robert Ormond Maugham the younger (1823–1884) and *Edith Mary Snell Maugham (1840–1882); brother of *Charles Ormond, *Frederic Herbert, and *William Somerset Maugham. Born at Paris, Henry Neville Maugham attended, with his older brothers, Charles and Frederick, Dover College, Kent, where he played on the rugby team. After leaving Cambridge, he joined his brother Charles in Paris to help manage the law firm established by their father. However, Harry wanted little or nothing to do with the law. In fact, he, not his younger brother William Somerset, became the first imaginative writer in the Maugham family. He left France, traveled in Egypt and Italy, and settled in Assisi, in Perugia, where he produced a blank verse play, The Husband of Poverty: A Drama in the Life of St. Francis of Assisi. Aside from an article, ‘‘The Amiable Egoist,’’ in the magazine Black and White (1901) and a lyric poem beginning ‘‘There was a Knight of Bethlehem,’’ published in several period anthologies, Henry Maugham had difficulty getting his work into print. Sensitive, charming, but terribly secretive, he considered himself an artistic purist who refused to compromise his supposedly high aesthetic standards to the demands of the popular literary and theatrical markets. In 1905, younger brother William Somerset tried to convince his literary agent, *James Brand Pinker, to place Henry’s posthumous novel, an Italian romance under the title of Richard Hawkblood. Even in death, Harry’s work could not see the light of a publisher’s press.
MAUGHAM, JOSEPH BEAUMONT the younger
165
When Henry Maugham prepared his will in 1895, all of the beneficiaries, including Wentworth Huyshe, a London friend of William Somerset when the latter attended the medical school at St. Thomas’ Hospital, proved to be young men with whom he had shared bohemian adventures (and perhaps even beds). In 1903, he moved to London and assumed the role of starving and eccentric artist. On 27 July 1904, his younger brother came calling and found him unconscious—fully clothed, lying in bed, with an empty bottle of nitric acid on the adjacent table. William dragged him into a cab and drove to St. Thomas’ Hospital, where Henry died on that day, at age thirty-six. Bibliography: Cordell; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, HONOR BETTY EARL (1901–1993?). Daughter of *Frederic Herbert Maugham (1866–1958) and *Helen Mary Romer Maugham (?–1950); sister of *Robert (Robin) Cecil Romer Maugham (1916–1981), *Diana Julia Maugham Marr-Johnson (1908–), and *Kate (Kittie) Mary Maugham Bruce (?– 1961). A well-known portrait painter, she did not number among the few of *Somerset Maugham’s favorite relatives. According to Maugham’s secretary/ companion, *Alan Searle, her uncle, particularly in his waning years, detested Honor, accusing her of being pushy. He never saw her unless he could not avoid it. In 1925 she married Sebastian Earl (?–1983); they had one son, Julian Romer Earl (1927–). Bibliography: Debrett’s; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, JOSEPH BEAUMONT the elder (fl. 1850–1890). Father of *Ralph S. Maugham (fl. 1865–1915) and grandfather of *Joseph Beaumont Maugham the younger (1892–?). Reportedly a cousin of *Somerset Maugham (and all other Maughams), he had come to America in the late 1850s and settled in Passaic, New Jersey. Joseph Baumont Maugham enlisted in a New Jersey regiment at the outbreak of the Civil War. Following the end of hostilities, he taught school and edited a local newspaper, the Tuckerton Beacon. Bibliography: Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, JOSEPH BEAUMONT the younger (1892–?). Son of *Ralph S. Maugham (fl. 1865–1915) and grandson of *Joseph Beaumont Maugham the elder (fl. 1850–1890). Reportedly a cousin of *Somerset Maugham, he had, in November 1910, contacted the writer during the latter’s visit to New York City. Calling upon Maugham at the St. Regis Hotel, the eighteen-year-old J. Beaumont Maugham brought his cousin to Tenafly, New Jersey, to meet his father. The young man’s dark complexion, curly hair, brown eyes, and stammer convinced Maugham that he and young J. Beaumont were indeed related. Bibliography: Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
166
MAUGHAM, RALPH S.
MAUGHAM, RALPH S. (fl. 1865–1915). Son of *Joseph Beaumont Maugham the elder (fl. 1850–1890) and father of *Joseph Beaumont Maugham the younger (1892–?). Reported to be a cousin of *Somerset Maugham (and all other Maughams), he had, in November 1910, met the writer when his son brought him from the St. Regis Hotel, New York City, to the family home at Tenafly, New Jersey. Ralph Maugham taught school in Tenafly. Bibliography: Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, ROBERT (ROBIN) CECIL ROMER (1916–1981). Son of *Frederic Herbert Maugham (1866–1958) and *Helen Mary Romer Maugham (?–1950); brother of *Diana Julia Maugham Marr-Johnson (1908–), *Kate (Kittie) Mary Maugham Bruce (?–1961), and *Honor Earl Maugham; nephew of *William Somerset Maugham. Born in London, Maugham attended Eton College (where he began a literary magazine, Sixpenny) and studied law at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a confirmed socialist. At the outbreak of World War II, he joined the British army and served (1942) as a lieutenant and tank commander with the Fourth Company of London Yeomanry, twenty-second Armored Brigade, of the Eighth Army in North Africa. There he received serious wounds to the chest and head that would, for the remainder of his life, cause him occasional lapses into amnesia, depression, and stammering. In 1943, he received assignment to the Middle East Intelligence Center, and in 1945 he was invalided out with the honorary rank of captain and a 50 percent disability pension. Although Maugham qualified as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, assumed (but did not pay much attention to) his father’s title as second Viscount Maugham (1958) and his seat in the House of Lords (1960), and lectured on the Middle East to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, he devoted his time and energy, from 1945 until his death, to writing. Certainly not as talented or as popular a writer as his Uncle William, Robin Maugham nonetheless evidenced a degree of the former’s prolificity: three short story collections, fourteen novels, ten plays (originals and adaptations), three plays written in collaboration with others, eight screenplays (two in collaboration with others), three television scripts, thirteen volumes of prose nonfiction (two of them collections of others’ works), and contributions to popular periodicals. The novel Rough and Smooth (1951) sold over 100,000 copies in German translations alone, while an earlier novel, The Servant (1948), became in 1966 a popular film. His biographical Somerset and All the Maughams (1966) and Conversations with Willie (1978), if nothing else, have cast interesting anecdotal light upon the life and times of William Somerset Maugham. Unfortunately, the aftermath of his war wounds, in combination with his bouts with alcohol, his *homosexual exploits, and his struggles to rise above the reputations of his father and his uncle contributed to a relatively unhappy life. Robin Maugham’s close relationship with his Uncle Willie began in mid-
MAUGHAM, ROBERT ORMOND the elder
167
1934, when the writer offered to send the eighteen-year-old boy money if he ran short during his travels throughout Europe after leaving Eton College. A true spiritual connection existed between the two, particularly if one considers their similar experiences at school. As with his uncle at King’s School, Canterbury, Robin had to endure Eton; bullied and tormented by older boys, he submitted to their sexual advances in hope that they would treat him with kindness. Rather than participate in athletics, he sang in the choir, studied piano, and wanted to go to Vienna to pursue further study of that instrument and to escape from his cold, unsympathetic, and chastising father. Simply, Robin Maugham looked to his free-spirited uncle rather than to his conforming and respectable parents. He began to send Maugham his stories for his reaction and criticism; the latter responded by issuing to his nephew money, gifts, an open invitation to visit the *Villa Mauresque, and advice that he would do better as a politician than as a writer or a journalist. Maugham saw in Robin the son he had always wanted—and wanted to dominate; in his uncle, Robin Maugham saw what he thought he really wanted from a father. Of course, on those occasions when Robin did visit the Mauresque, the combination of his uncle and his secretary/ companion *Gerald Haxton did little to calm the young man’s varied and often uncontrolled sexual appetites. At any rate, when Robin’s father resigned as lord chancellor of England in 1939 and became Viscount Maugham of Hartfield— which meant that his socialist son would succeed to the title upon Frederic Maugham’s death—Somerset Maugham was so elated that he settled a $25,000 trust upon his nephew (which he doubled to $50,000 in 1952). Simply, he believed that with a law degree and a title, Robin would establish a successful political career for himself. However, Robin insisted on trying to fill his uncle’s literary boots; in the end, complete with a male secretary/companion of his own, he managed to enjoy a fair degree of success. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Contemporary Authors, NRS, 40; Curtis (1977); Robin Maugham (1981, 1978, 1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, ROBERT CLEVELAND (1864–1865). Firstborn child of *Robert Ormond Maugham the younger (1823–1884) and *Edith Mary Snell Maugham (1840–1882). He died at Paris in infancy. Bibliography: Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, ROBERT ORMOND the elder (?–1862). Father of *Robert Ormond Maugham the younger (1823–1884), *Henry MacDonald Maugham (1828–1897), and six other children; paternal grandfather of *Charles Ormond, *Frederic Herbert, *Henry Neville, and *William Somerset Maugham. Born in the Westmorland Lake District near the Scottish border, the son of a farmer ruined in the Napoleonic Wars, Robert Maugham rose to become the first secretary to the Incorporated Law Society, Chancery Lane, London, the second most important legal association in England. After serving his articles with a
168
MAUGHAM, ROBERT ORMOND the younger
Mr. Barrow of Threadneedle Street, London, Maugham gained admission as a solicitor in 1817. Eight years later (1825), he and another lawyer, Bryan Holme, urged the formation of the Incorporated Law Society, which eventually came about in 1831. Maugham functioned as the organization’s secretary and solicitor until his death in 1862. Maugham’s more than ten published works include treatises on the principles of the usury laws (1824), the law of attorneys (1825), and the laws of literary property (1828). He edited (1839) A Complete Collection of the Statutes and Rules and Orders of Court Relating to Attornies [sic]. In 1830, Maugham founded the Legal Observer, and he edited that journal until 1856, when it merged with the Solicitors’ Journal and Reporter. Further, he served as a principal promoter of the Attorneys and Solicitors Acts (1843, 1860). The members of the Law Society subscribed, in 1856, £600 as a testimonial to Maugham. He died on 16 July 1862, his burial occurring six days after at Nunhead Cemetery in the London borough of Camberwell. Bibliography: Cordell; DNB; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan; Weinreb and Hibbert.
MAUGHAM, ROBERT ORMOND the younger (1823–1884). Son of *Robert Ormond Maugham the elder (?–1862), husband of *Edith Mary Snell Maugham (1840–1882), brother of *Henry MacDonald Maugham (1828–1897), and father of *Robert Cleveland, *Charles Ormond, *Frederic Herbert, *Henry Neville, and *William Somerset Maugham. A London lawyer, Robert Maugham entered into partnership with a friend, William Dixon, and in 1848 they established a Paris office at No. 12 Rue Royale. Maugham assumed management of the office and subsequently (1850) received the appointment to take charge of the legal affairs of the British Embassy. In 1863, he moved the firm to No. 54 Faubourg Saint Honore, almost directly across the street from the embassy itself. Maugham married Edith Mary Snell, seventeen years younger than he, on 1 October 1863. Although her friends could not understand the reasons for such a beautiful woman marrying a short, unattractive, and considerably older man, Maugham’s bride defended her selection, maintaining that her husband’s kindness compensated for his lack of good looks. The Maughams assumed residence in a spacious apartment at No. 25 Avenue d’Antin (now Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt), complete with French servants and an English governess. During the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War, the family lived in London but returned to the same apartment in August 1871, following the Treaty of Frankfurt and the end of hostilities. Robert Maugham rented a summer house at Deauville, northeast of Caen, and during the warm months sent his family there, joining them on weekends. When Edith Mary Maugham died on 31 January 1884, at age forty-four, her husband was fifty-nine and in ill health. Indeed, he required an associate to assist with work at the office. Even in such a dispirited and unhealthy state, Robert Ormond Maugham retained sufficient strength to oversee the construction of a new and rather strange
MAUGHAM, WILLIAM SOMERSET
169
house atop a hill in Suresnes, a western suburb of Paris, and overlooking the Seine River. The structure represented a Swiss chalet; it also featured a distinctive Moorish symbol—variously interpreted as (1) a stylized human hand and fingers, (2) an upright sword covered by the arch of the sky, (3) the wishbone of a chicken, and (4) an upside-down cross of Lorraine—that Robert Maugham had brought back with him from one of his several journeys to North Africa and then had engraved upon the windows of the new house. That symbol would, in turn, not only appear prominently at the entrance of his youngest son’s Villa Mauresque at Cap Ferrat but, beginning with the publication of his novel *The Hero (1901), adorn every volume that he published. It also became a watermark on each page of Somerset Maugham’s collected works, the letterhead for his stationery, and ornaments for his automobiles, cigarette cases, and matchbooks. He even shared it with his nephew, novelist and playwright *Robin Maugham. Two years following the death of his wife, on 24 June 1884, Robert Ormond Maugham died of stomach cancer at age sixty-one. His income had been seriously depleted by his building project, summer home rentals, travels, and the maintenance of his wife’s social position in Paris. The estate executors sold what he had brought back from his travels abroad: Gustave Dore´ engravings, Tanagra statuettes, and Turkish daggers. They also disposed of the house at Suresnes for but a small proportion of its original cost. Divided among the four surviving sons, the total of £4,690 would yield approximately £150 per year per son. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990, 1972/1973); Cordell; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, (BARBARA) SOPHIA (SOPHIE) VON SCHEIDLIN (?– 1892). German-born wife of the Reverend Henry MacDonald Maugham (1828– 1897) and aunt of *Charles Ormond, *Frederic Herbert, and *William Somerset Maugham. The daughter of Baron Von Scheidlin, a Nuremberg merchant, she remained attentive to her noble background while managing the vicarage at Whitstable, Kent, with typical German efficiency. When young Maugham decided in 1890 not to return to King’s School, Canterbury, Sophie Maugham suggested that he go to Heidelberg and thus inquired of her relatives in Munich to recommend a family with which the boy might lodge. She died in August 1892 (a month before her nephew entered St. Thomas’ Hospital, London) while on holiday at Bad Ems, in the Rhineland-Palatinate of western Germany on the River Lahn and twelve miles from Koblenz. In her memory, Henry MacDonald Maugham donated a costly stone and marble pulpit to All Saints Church, Whitstable. Bibliography: Cordell; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
MAUGHAM, WILLIAM SOMERSET (1875–1965). Born in the maternity ward of the British Embassy on the Faubourg St. Honore, Paris, *France, on 25 January 1875, Maugham was the youngest surviving son of *Robert Ormond
170
MAUGHAM, WILLIAM SOMERSET
Maugham the younger (1823–1884) and *Edith Mary Snell Maugham (1840– 1882). In addition to William Somerset, the three other surviving Maugham brothers had also been born in Paris: *Charles Ormond (1865–1958?), *Frederic Herbert (1866–1958), and *Henry Neville (1868–1904). William Somerset Maugham’s early years proved happy enough; he spoke more and better French than English, became thoroughly immersed in French culture, and basked under the love and adoration of his mother. Edith Maugham suffered from tuberculosis, and the birth of the Maughams’ final child in 1882 helped to cause her death. That event brought immediate tragedy and trauma into eight-year-old William’s life. Robert Maugham removed the boy from the French school and placed him in charge of a tutor for English-language lessons. In 1884, the elder Maugham died of cancer, which caused, at age ten, the boy’s removal from the urbane metropolitan capital of France to the hinterlands of provincial England. Maugham became the ward of his father’s only surviving brother, the Reverend *Henry MacDonald Maugham (1828–1897), vicar of the parish of All Saints, Whitstable, on the Kentish coast and six miles from Canterbury. The vicar and his first wife, German-born *Sophie Von Scheidlin Maugham (d.1892), themselves childless, occupied the vicarage, situated two miles from the church. After primary education at a local school conducted by the wife of a physician, Maugham, in May 1885, entered King’s School, Canterbury, where he spent almost four years of torment and general unhappiness. Although an excellent scholar, he as yet did not have a firm grasp of the English language, he stuttered, and he had no interest in athletics—all of which prompted ridicule and harassment from his classmates. In winter 1888, he contracted what appears to have been tuberculosis, and Rev. Maugham sent him off to the ancient winter resort of Hyeres on the French Riviera, where he spent two winter terms with an English tutor reading Guy de Maupassant. In July 1889, deciding to leave King’s and thus pass up the opportunity for a university education, Maugham went to Heidelberg, *Germany, where he listened to lectures by the German philosopher Ernst Kuno Berthold Fischer (1824–1907) on the German pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1780–1860) at the university, attended avantgarde plays by *Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), and engaged in his first *homosexual affair with the twenty-six-year-old Englishman from Cambridge, *John Ellingham Brooks (1864–1929). From Brooks, Maugham developed an appreciation for literature, particularly the works of John Henry Newman (1801– 1890), George Meredith (1828–1909), Walter Horatio Pater (1839–1904), Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), and Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1883). He returned to Whitstable in 1892 after eighteen months abroad, having been stripped of his superficial Christianity and infected with a lust for travel that would remain with him throughout the rest of his life. Obviously, Rev. Henry MacDonald Maugham hoped that his nephew would enter the church. However, young Maugham still had his yearly income of £150 from his father’s estate. He went to London, worked for a month with an accounting firm in Chancery Lane, returned to Whitstable, and then, in September
MAUGHAM, WILLIAM SOMERSET
171
1892, at age eighteen, enrolled himself as a medical student in St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, where he would remain for the next five years. He continued to read with energy and enthusiasm, and while viewing firsthand the harsh realities of London life during his medical apprenticeship, he maintained a series of notebooks through which he developed his passion for writing, first fiction, then drama. In 1897, Maugham qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and as a licentiate of the College of Physicians. However, he never practiced his profession. Simply, the publication of his first novel, *Liza of Lambeth (1897), and its modest success encouraged him to devote the remainder of his life to literature—to the novel, short story, play, essay, and travel narrative. Upon leaving St. Thomas’s, Maugham went off to *Spain, where he traveled, read, and wrote. The products of that tour included his first published short story, *‘‘The Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian’’ (1898), and two books of narrative sketches, *The Land of the Blessed Virgin (1905) and *Don Fernando (1935, 1950). Back in England in 1899, Maugham completed and worked on additional novels: *The Making of a Saint (1898), *The Hero (1901), *Mrs. Craddock (1902), *The Merry-Go-Round (1904), *The Bishop’s Apron (1906), *The Explorer (1907), and *The Magician (1908). Even though his £150 annual income had been supplemented with an additional £100 from his writing, Maugham still lacked the funds to establish and maintain himself in high society, although by 1900 he had managed to gain entry into the periphery of a small number of social circles. Nonetheless, in July 1904, he went off to Paris in the company of the first of his three secretary/companions, *Harry Philips. There he met the portrait painter *Gerald Kelly, the writer *Arnold Bennett, and the noted satanist *Aleister Crowley. From the simple perspectives of fame and fortune, the change in Maugham’s life came when he turned his attention from the novel to the stage. Although his first play, *A Man of Honour, trod the boards in 1903, not until 1907, with the production of *Lady Frederick at the Court Theatre, London, did he actually achieve meaningful popularity, real literary recognition, and significant financial reward. Within less than a year, three of his plays could be found upon the stages of London theaters: *Jack Straw, *Mrs. Dot, and a dramatic version of *The Explorer (all 1908). Beginning in 1909, he found himself in a position to write what and when he pleased, and he sent forth a barrage of comedies and melodramas that ridiculed and lashed out at the hypocritical conventions of pre– World War I British society: *Penelope (1909), *Smith (1909), *The Tenth Man (1910; his first stage failure), *Grace (1910), *Loaves and Fishes (1911), *The Perfect Gentleman (1913), and *The Land of Promise (1913). After 1933, he would cease to write plays, tired and discouraged by the necessary restrictions of theater managers, the fluctuating temperaments of actors and actresses, and the changing expectations of drama critics and the theatergoing public. At the outbreak of World War I, Maugham volunteered for active service with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver; again, he refused to practice the
172
MAUGHAM, WILLIAM SOMERSET
profession for which he had formally trained. At Ypres, Flanders, and Dunkirk, he found the time to correct the proofs for the autobiographical novel that chronicled the first thirty years of his life, *Of Human Bondage, a work that, following its 1915 publication, would eventually amass for him greater literary reputation and significant financial gain. Reportedly, by the time of Maugham’s death in 1965, it had sold 10 million copies. In addition to reading proofs in France, Maugham met and fell in love with the second of his three secretary/companions, *Gerald Haxton. That often stormy association would end only with Gerald’s death in 1944 at age fifty-two. By 1915, Maugham had left the Red Cross for the British Intelligence Service, posing in Geneva, *Switzerland, as a literary person. Indeed, he probably produced more literature than he uncovered secrets, particularly in terms of the successful short story sequence based on that experience (and to a lesser extent the later Russian mission), *Ashenden, or the British Agent (1928). During 1916–1917, Maugham saw two more of his plays on stage and in print, *Caroline (1916) and *Our Betters (1917), and he managed trips to the United States and the South Seas as well. The latter area yielded ample material for another collection of short stories, *The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), which included one of his best and perhaps most popular pieces of short fiction, ‘‘Miss Thompson,’’ later changed to *Rain for the stage and film versions and for the complete collection of his short stories. In *Tahiti in February 1917, Maugham investigated the life and work of the painter *Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), who would emerge two years later (1919) as †Charles Strickland in the novel *The Moon and Sixpence. In the fall of 1917, Maugham embarked on the second of his spy missions, this one to Petrograd, Russia, to prevent the newly formed regime of *Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky (1881–1970) from taking Russia out of World War I. The mission failed, and Maugham sincerely believed that had he been sent to Petrograd six months earlier, he might have been instrumental in averting the Bolshevik revolution and retaining Kerensky as an ally of Britain. The entire experience affected his health, however; once more run down with tuberculosis, he entered a sanatorium in Banchory, *Scotland, in the winter of 1917, where he spent three months, returning for a second visit a year later. At this point, one needs to take note of Maugham’s marriage on 26 May 1917 at Jersey City, New Jersey, to *Gwendolyn Maude (Syrie) Barnardo Wellcome (1879–1955), daughter of the religious philanthropist *Thomas John Barnardo. Maugham had first met her in 1910 or 1911, shortly after she had legally been separated from her first husband, the wealthy American-born pharmaceutical manufacturer *Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853–1936). Their daughter, *Elizabeth Mary Maugham (called Liza after the title character of Maugham’s first novel), was born 1 September 1915, prior to Syrie’s 1917 divorce from Wellcome and her marriage to Maugham. Syrie and Maugham never really had much to do with each other after their marriage, mostly because the writer preferred travel and the company of his male companions on the Riviera, particularly
MAUGHAM, WILLIAM SOMERSET
173
Gerald Haxton. Thus, the union ground forward to its inevitable and official dissolution in a French court on 11 May 1929. Shortly before the end of his marriage, Maugham determined to live permanently in the south of France. In October 1926, he purchased *Villa Mauresque, a house at St. Jean, Cap Ferrat, on the French Riviera, for $48,000. There he wrote and entertained what can only be termed ‘‘smart company’’—literary, political, and social friends in high places. There he collected art and books. Beginning in 1920, he traveled abroad every year and went to England only when literary or theatrical occasions demanded. He continued to write and to make money with such projects as the novels *The Painted Veil (1925) and *Cakes and Ale (1930), his favorite novel. Among his better plays of the period were numbered *The Circle (1921), *East of Suez (1922), and *The Constant Wife (1927). His short story collections included *The Casuarina Tree (1926) and *Ah King (1933). Maugham found the time to visit Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, the United States, Central America, the Near East, the West Indies, Australia, Africa, and *India. In 1940, with the fall of France and the escalation of World War II, Maugham quickly left France for a brief residence in England. Then, as an employee of the British Ministry of Information, he went to the United States. Although he managed trips to New York and California, he spent most of the time in South Carolina, in a small house built for him by his American publisher, *Nelson Doubleday. In addition to the second-rate novels of this period, *Up at the Villa (1941) and the propaganda piece *The Hour before the Dawn (1942), Maugham published one of his better efforts, *The Razor’s Edge (1944). The story of †Larry Darrell’s abandonment of Western materialism in favor of Indian mysticism sold approximately three million copies and yielded a successful *Hollywood film. Following the liberation of France, Maugham returned to the Villa Mauresque. Gerald Haxton had died in the United States in 1944, and Maugham engaged his third secretary/companion, *Alan Searle (1904–), whom he had known since 1928. If nothing else, Searle proved the most competent secretary among the three, and Maugham actually and legally attempted to adopt him in 1963. Following the publication of his last two novels, *Then and Now (1946) and *Catalina (1948), Maugham turned to autobiographical works and prose nonfiction. Those books worth noting include *A Writer’s Notebook (1949), *The Vagrant Mood (1952), *Ten Novels and Their Authors (1954), *Points of View (1958), and the illustrated *Purely for My Pleasure (1962). In 1947, Maugham founded the Somerset Maugham Award, providing a young writer £500 solely for travel. Then, in April 1962, the sale of thirty-five of his paintings at Sotheby’s, London, realized $1,466,864, and that sum went into a fund for struggling and aged writers. Maugham received the Companion of Honour (1954) and the Commander of the Legion of Honour (1961). Additional honors included Fellow of the Library of Congress, Fellow of the *Royal Society of Literature, and honorary doctorates from universities at Oxford and Toulouse. In 1954, on the
174
MAUPASSANT, HENRY RENE ALBERT GUY DE
occasion of his eightieth birthday, Maugham received a dinner in his honor at the Garrick Club, London; only Charles Dickens (1812–1870), Anthony Trollope (1915–1882), and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) had been so honored. Maugham died at the Anglo-American Hospital at Nice, France, on 15 December 1965. A substantial legacy, including his library, went to his old school, King’s, at Canterbury, and his ashes were interred next to the library that he had endowed. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990, 1972/1973); Cordell; Current Biography (1963); DNB (1961–1970); Fisher; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan; Pfeiffer; Raphael (1976/ 1977).
MAUPASSANT, HENRY RENE ALBERT GUY DE (1850–1893). French novelist and short story writer. Born at the Norman Chateau de Miromesnil, Dieppe, France, Maupassant studied at Rouen and spent practically his entire life in Normandy. After serving as a soldier in the Franco-Prussian War (1870– 1871) and as a government clerk, he began to write fiction, encouraged by his mother’s friend, Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880). His work ranges from the short tale of one or two pages to the full-length novel. Free from sentimentality or idealism, Maupassant’s fiction, with minute and merciless observation, lays bare the pretentiousness and vulgarity of the middle class of the period, as well as exposes the animal cunning and traditional meanness of the peasants of Normandy. In 1880 he first met success with ‘‘Boule de Suif’’ (Ball of fat), and the newspapers demanded to publish his work. In Le Maison Tellier (1881), the writer relies on penetrating satire and humor to relate the tale of an outing for the inmates of a provincial house of ill fame. Then followed approximately 300 stories and several novels, including Une Vie (A Woman’s Life, 1883), the autobiographical Bel Ami (1885), and Fort Comme la Morte (1889). Such stories as ‘‘Le Horla’’ (Hallucination) and ‘‘La Peur’’ (Fear) describe madness and fear with a horrifying accuracy that foreshadows Maupassant’s own insanity in 1892, when he was committed to a Paris asylum and where he died. A fairly heavy dose of critical commentary about *Maugham’s debt to Maupassant exists, and most of those comparisons prove both obvious and correct. Maugham first read Maupassant (a frequent visitor to the Paris salon of his mother, *Edith Mary Snell Maugham), seriously at the age of fourteen, when, after an attack of tuberculosis, he spent the winter of 1888 at Hyeres on the French Riviera, studying the French writer with an English tutor. He had read most of the Frenchman’s fiction before he had turned twenty. So strong was the influence of the French writer’s harsh, truthful, and realistic view of life, a view of the world well lost, that he would admit later that he wrote *Liza of Lambeth (1897) as he thought Maupassant would have written it. By 1927, the French literary establishment recognized and acclaimed Maugham as a disciple of Maupassant and Flaubert; although he would receive similar praise in England, a number of reviewers complained that Maugham had not really improved upon, or done anything different from, his French models other than imitate them.
MAURESQUE, VILLA
175
Maupassant even made an indirect cameo appearance in one of Maugham’s novels. In *Of Human Bondage, †Emily Wilkinson, the clergyman’s daughter and former governess for families from France and Germany, hints that Maupassant made love to her. She says this, no doubt, for †Philip Carey’s benefit. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Cordell; Crystal; Curtis (1974); MacCarthy (1933/1934/ 1977); Morgan; Mortimer; Thorne.
MAURESQUE, VILLA. In 1865, King Leopold II (1835–1909) purchased Saint Jean-Cap Ferrat. This narrow peninsula and small fishing port and resort lay on the bay of Villefranche in southeastern *France on the French Riviera, between Nice (nine miles away) and Monte Carlo (eight miles distant). There he built a palace and three houses in a large park, as well as a fourth house on the west side of Cap Ferrat in 1906 for the priest who served as his confessor. The last-mentioned structure, in the Moorish style, became *Somerset Maugham’s Villa Mauresque. A large garden complemented the keyhole windows, domes and minarets, colonnades and columns. By early 1926, the house and its eight acres of terraced land had been vacant for several years and thus stood dirty and overrun with weeds. Agents had difficulty selling it because of the costs involved in repair and restoration. Maugham submitted an offer in April 1926 that proved not acceptable to the owners, and thus he and the agents began lengthy negotiations. In late September or early October 1926, the owners of the house finally accepted his offer of $48,500. Maugham turned the rehabilitation work over to a Nice architect, Henri Delmotte, with instructions that he wanted to occupy the premises by the spring of 1927. He named the structure Villa Mauresque—which, loosely translated, refers to anything of Moorish art or architecture; in addition, the new label fit in well with the symbolic trademark that he had adopted from his father. With the exception of the five years of absence during World War II, Maugham would inhabit the Mauresque from the late spring of 1927 until his death at Nice on 15 December 1965. After passing the white plaster gatepost with the symbol etched in red, one proceeded up a curved gravel drive lined with rocks and clumps of agapanthi (or African lilies) and observed orange, lemon, banana, tangerine, and avocado trees in the garden. At the end of the drive stood the square white house with long green shutters, built around an interior arched courtyard. It contained seven bedrooms (two on the ground floor) and four bathrooms. The high-ceilinged dining room could seat eight comfortably, while the large drawing room housed a fireplace of stone from Arles, in south-central France on the Rhone River delta. The furniture tended to be Spanish in style, and, of course, books and bookshelves loomed everywhere. Maugham’s writing room resembled an oblong box that had been placed on the flat roof of the two-story house. French windows ran along one long wall, while bookcases lined the one opposite. Nearby, one spied the pool, dug out of rock on a hillside overlooking the house and surrounded by four pinecones cast in lead. At one end stood a Bernini
176
‘‘MAYHEW’’
fawn with water spouting from its mouth. A second house on the premises served as apartments for the thirteen servants: a cook, two maids, a butler, a footman, a chauffeur, and seven gardeners. Finally, a two-car garage completed the estate. During World War II, Maugham, in America, feared that either the Italians or the Germans or perhaps even British shell fire would destroy Villa Mauresque, but that never totally happened. The estate survived an incendiary bomb that destroyed part of the garden; all of its windows had been broken, while stair-steps and floors had been torn out, and the roof damaged; French troops had looted the place. In August 1944, the American Seventh Army occupied the residence as a rest house for officers. Maugham even thought of selling it and taking up permanent residence in England. However, he and his secretary/ companion *Alan Searle returned to Cap Ferrat in May 1946 and undertook restoration of the house. By the late 1940s the villa had nearly returned to its grand prewar state, and in 1954, to avoid French death duties, Maugham transferred the Mauresque into a corporation called the Societe Civile Villa Mauresque, placing the shares in the name of his daughter, *Liza, then married to *John Hope. However, given Maugham’s deteriorating mental and physical stability, he began to imagine the place no longer being his. Thus, after 1954, he refused to carry out repairs, claiming he no longer owned the estate. Then, in 1958, Maugham and Searle held a series of ‘‘bonfire nights’’ in the large stone fireplace of the drawing room at the Mauresque, destroying a significant number of the writer’s letters (both ‘‘from’’ and ‘‘to’’) and even some manuscripts. Simply, Maugham wanted nothing left after his death to allow persons to judge him in his absence (a luxury that he would not extend to his former wife, *Gwendolyn Syrie Barnardo Maugham). In November 1961, he informed Liza that he would sell the Mauresque by January 1962 and live in Lausanne, *Switzerland. However, he abandoned that project when his lawyers informed him that he could not possibly be evicted from Cap Ferrat. Liza Maugham Hope, Lady Glendevon, held on to the Mauresque until 1966, then placed it on the market for more than $1 million. There it remained until 1969, when J. S. Landau, a New York builder and real estate promoter, purchased the estate for $730,000; he occupied the house for his own residence and divided the remainder into lots. Bibliography: Cordell; Jonas (1956); Kanin; Robin Maugham (1978); Morgan.
‘‘MAYHEW’’ (1924). A very short story written in 1923, published initially in 1924, then included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). The piece concerns the sudden decision of an honest and sincere lawyer from Detroit, Michigan, who, by age thirty-five, had achieved a large and lucrative practice. However, although a person of energy, he had also become insensitive to beauty. Then he abandoned his affluent and materialistic existence to live on *Capri and to study Roman history. †Mayhew, the title character, has managed to escape
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
177
the pattern that the circumstances of his birth and environment should have imposed upon him. In other words, he grasped life in his own hands and molded it to his own particular liking. Once on Capri, Mayhew collected books and spent fourteen years reading them, taking thousands of notes, and sorting and classifying the material that he had amassed. When, at last, he found himself ready to write, he sat down and died. ‘‘The body that he, the materialist, had treated so contumeliously took its revenge on him.’’ Therefore, he ‘‘never knew the bitterness of an end achieved.’’ Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
MELONEY, MARIE (MISSY) MATTINGLY (1878–1943). American journalist and magazine editor, the only daughter and younger child of Dr. Cyprian Peter Mattingly, a physician, and his third wife, Sarah Irwin (1852–1934)—a journalist, magazine editor, and former president of Washington (D.C.) College for Girls. By two former wives, Dr. Mattingly had sired nineteen children. Born in Bardstown, Kentucky, Marie Mattingly received a private education that included the study of piano. In 1895, at age sixteen, she obtained employment with the Washington Post, then wrote sketches of political figures that she sold to the New York World and the Denver Post. Two years later, at age eighteen, she secured the position of Washington Bureau chief of the Denver newspaper, then rejoined the Washington Post. She held other positions on the staffs of the New York World (1900), the New York Herald (1900–1901), and then the New York Sun (1901–1904). In 1904, she married a Sun editor, William Brown Meloney (1878–1925). In 1914, Marie Meloney gained the editorship of Woman’s Magazine and then served for three years (1917–1920) as associate editor of Everybody’s. She edited Delineator (1921–1926), where she focused on fashion, fiction, biographies of noted women, and the popular causes of the day: improvement of teaching, child health, and the rehabilitation of war-ravaged Europe. Then she joined the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune and its experimental magazine, This Week (1926–until her death). *Maugham made contact with Marie Meloney in the summer of 1935, principally to assist him in publishing his work in the popular press in the United States and with the selling of the manuscripts of his already published works to New York dealers. During World War II, she published one of his articles, *‘‘They Also Serve,’’ in a 1942 issue of This Week, for which she paid $1,000 to his literary agent, *Jacques Chambrun (who gave Maugham only $625 of that sum). Maugham also corresponded with Meloney, most often while he resided, 1941–1945, with the Doubledays in South Carolina. Bibliography: Morgan; Notable American Women.
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND (1904). A novel published in September 1904 in London by *William Heinemann, who printed 3,000 copies; reprinted (1978)
178
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
by Penguin Books. The piece really consists of three stories, each independent of one another but linked by central and transitional characters. †Mary (Polly) Ley—an affluent fifty-five-year-old handsome, affluent, and still attractive spinster whom *Maugham recycled from his 1902 novel, *Mrs. Craddock—will appear in lesser roles in the short story *‘‘The Happy Couple’’ and the novel *The Magician (both 1908). The other important (and oft-recycled) character to the unity of the novel, †Dr. Frank Hurrell, comes into contact with most of the parties concerned. At age thirty and as an assistant physician at St. Luke’s Hospital, London, he has known †Basil Kent from the time that both were Oxford undergraduates. Hurrell represents a regular visitor to the home of Polly Ley, who has determined to leave a third of her estate to him; he examines †Herbert Field, diagnoses his illness as consumption, and visits his dying patient regularly at Tercanbury, Kent; and he spends a holiday with †Grace and †Paul Castillyon at the latter’s estate in Jeyston, Dorsetshire. Observing the three strands of the novel separately, one finds little that he or she has not seen before (and will see again) in Maugham’s themes and characters. A barrister and writer, Basil Kent, a veteran of the Boer War, loves the handsome widow †Hilda Murray, who has an income of £5,000 pounds per year. However, he becomes involved with a London barmaid at the Golden Crown, Fleet Street, †Jenny Bush, and must marry her when she becomes pregnant with their child. She delivers the child stillborn and becomes extremely ill from the process. After they settle in the bland, lower middle-class London district of Barnes, Basil publishes a first novel, but it receives poor reviews. Eighteen months after their marriage, Jenny, realizing that Basil no longer loves her and that his heart remains committed to Hilda Murray, throws herself into the river Thames. Basil, feeling guilty, thinks about jumping into the river and shooting himself; he cannot bring himself to do either. After spending the winter in Seville, *Spain, he returns to England, becomes engaged to Hilda, then marries her. In the end, they both lay roses on Jenny’s grave. Interesting secondary characters attach themselves to the traumas of the principals. Basil Kent’s mother, †Lady Marguerite Elizabeth Claire Vizard, has retained her beauty and splendor. Walking with the majesty of an Eastern queen, she has done battle with two husbands in the divorce courts and awaits the moment when she can be received into the Roman Catholic Church. At the other end of the social yardstick resides Jenny Bush’s family. The stout and determined mother, †Mrs. Bush, lives in Crouch End, London, and drinks. The sister, †Annie, plain but with a graceful figure, keeps an attentive eye upon attractive and available men. †James Bush, the young Cockney brother and a product of a boarding school at Margate, formerly functioned as an auctioneer’s clerk. Sacked from his job for stealing £115 from his firm, James will go to prison unless he repays the money within a week’s time. He doggedly hangs about the Kents’ rooms in Barnes, harassing Jenny for money. Thus, a single instance of indiscretion has hurled Basil Kent from one social extreme to another. Irony
METHUEN AND COMPANY
179
joins hands with tragedy as Jenny’s suicide rescues him from the grasp of the Bush clan. The problem with the Castillyons echoes a prevalent social ill of the time. At age thirty-five, Grace Castillyon, vivacious and excitable, also suffers from a restless nature. As Maugham frankly tells us, she has the soul of a trollop. Her roving eye rests upon the tall and strapping twenty-two-year-old †Reggie Barlow-Bassett. Grace ‘‘lends’’ the unscrupulous and dishonest Reggie money in exchange for his affections. However, Reggie suddenly has a change of heart and casts his lot with †Lauria Galbraith; he joins her on the stage, fathers an heir, and takes them both to Bournemouth. In the meantime, Grace realizes how much better off she will be with her husband, Paul, the dull and pompous member of Parliament. In the end, despite the hatred of Grace by Paul’s ill-bred mother, †Mrs. Castillyon, Paul and Grace rediscover each other and save their marriage. Finally, Maugham unravels the sad tale of Herbert Field, a twenty-year-old bank clerk at Tercanbery, Kent, and the son of linendraper at nearby Blackstable. Thin and delicate, Herbert writes mediocre poetry and, to no one’s surprise, becomes consumptive. He meets forty-year-old †Bella Langton, an unattractive but kind daughter of a Tercanbury cleric. She falls in love with Herbert Field, proposes marriage to him after discovering his consumption, and, after the wedding, takes her husband to *Italy. Bella’s father, the widower †Algernon Langton, dean of Tercanbury, turns out to be an old friend and distant cousin of Polly Ley. A poet in his own right, he composed a set of Latin verses to commemorate Bella’s fortieth birthday. At any rate, Algernon refuses to give his consent to Bella’s marriage; yet, when Bella brings the dying Herbert back to Tercanbury, Algernon allows them to stay in the deanery. He reconciles with Bella and administers the Holy Sacrament to Herbert. Once more, tragedy opens the way to a resolution of social differences. After Herbert’s death, Bella collects her husband’s verses and plans to publish them, accompanied by a prefatory biography that she has written. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1974); Morgan; Viswanath.
METHUEN AND COMPANY. The London publishing firm begun in 1889 by Sir Algernon Methuen (original name Algernon Methuen Marshall Stedman, 1856–1924). Initially a teacher of classics and French (1885–1895), Methuen began the firm to publish and market his own textbooks. He first achieved wider publishing success when he issued *Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads in 1892. He also published works by Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), *Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), Joseph Conrad (1857– 1924), and John Masefield (1878–1967). In 1906, Methuen and Company entered into a contract with *Maugham for three novels. The firm accepted *The Magician (1908) as the first installment, paying the writer an advance of seventy-five pounds. However, after the work
180
MEXICO
had been set in type, one of the partners read it and became so shocked that he stopped publication. Eventually, *William Heinemann published the novel, and Maugham and Methuen argued over the three novels that the writer owed the publishers. Maugham returned the advance, and Methuen attempted to recover costs of preparing the initial proofs of The Magician. Nothing much happened until November 1911, when Methuen reminded Maugham of their agreement. After Maugham refused and threatened to take the entire issue to court, the publisher withdrew his reminder, and the two parted company. Bibliography: Crystal; DNB; Morgan.
MEXICO. In the middle of September 1924, *Maugham and his secretary/ companion *Gerald Haxton sailed from London for Mexico by way of New York. The writer again sought material for a novel. They arrived in Mexico City in late October, and Maugham managed a brief meeting with Frieda and *D. H. Lawrence, who had come there from Sicily. Maugham and Haxton then left for a side trip to Cuernavaca, some sixty miles to the south. Upon their return, they had an uncomfortable lunch with the Lawrences, hosted by Zelia Nuttall, an American writer and archaeologist. Other than several young boys obtained for personal pleasure, Maugham did not derive much material from his Mexican journey and abandoned the idea for a novel or stories anchored to that locale. After brief visits to Vera Cruz and Yucata´n, he and Haxton sailed for Havana, Cuba, then on to Guatemala. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
‘‘MIRAGE’’ (1922). A short story that appeared in a collection of travel sketches, *On a Chinese Screen. †The Narrator, in Haiphong awaiting a ship to Hong Kong, meets †Grosely, who claims to have been at the medical college of St. Thomas’ Hospital, London, at the same time as he. Grosely had remained for only a year and abruptly left for China. Then the Narrator recalls him as a young boy of eighteen, the son of a country doctor, who rarely attended lectures but spent most of his time drinking and womanizing. To finance his habits, Grosely had developed a scheme whereby he purchased items at auctions and then pawned them for ten shillings or a pound more than he had originally paid. However, he carried the scheme too far by purchasing the items for credit, for which he was arrested and remanded to jail for six weeks or so. When the Narrator meets him in Haiphong, he learns that Grosely has earned money from employment with the Chinese Customs Service, which he invested; he married a Haiphong girl, who bore him a child. He invites the Narrator to his home for evening tea, where he smokes opium and tells about his twenty years in *China. At one point, he returned to England but could not face the disappointment that London had afforded him; similarly, he could not return to another of his faded dreams, China. ‘‘For years, England had been like a mirage
THE MIXTURE AS BEFORE
181
in the desert. But when he had yielded to the attraction, those shining pools and the palm trees and the green grass were nothing but the rolling sandy dunes.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; On a Chinese Screen.
‘‘MISS KING’’ (1928). A part of the short story sequence, *Ashenden; or, the British Agent. †Miss King, a little Englishwoman well over eighty years of age and governess to the †Daughters of †Prince Ali, wears false teeth, an elaborate, mousy brown wig, and heavy makeup and possesses a generally grotesque appearance. Could she be a British agent? Ali, an Egyptian prince and a near relative of the deposed †Khedive, bitterly hates the English, as does his secretary, †Mustapha Pasha. *Maugham brings them all under the roof of a Geneva hotel, where they do little but dine, play cards, and engage in suspicious conversation. Those exercises come under the eye of Maugham’s intellectually minded espionage agent †Ashenden. However, before the piece can motivate itself to go forward, Ashenden must endure a combination of instructions and morality lessons from his superior, †R, and an interview with two quasi-comic Geneva detectives whom he names †Fafner and †Fasolt, the giants of the Rhinegold, and who bear some resemblance to Ernest Hemingway’s Al and Max of ‘‘The Killers.’’ Then he encounters the †Baroness von Higgins, an Austrian resident of the Geneva hotel and the granddaughter of a Yorkshire stable boy who eventually became the Austrian plenipotentiary to an Italian court. Although over forty years of age, she remains extremely beautiful and, to no one’s surprise, functions as an agent in the service of the Austrian government. To complete the menagerie, a German spy, †Count Holzminden, sits in a corner table of the hotel dining room. Following dinner, Ashenden, Prince Ali, Mustapha Pasha, and Baroness von Higgins play bridge, where they discuss the national aspirations of *Egypt. Finally, some twenty-three pages later, Ashenden goes to bed, only to be awakened at 3:00 A.M. by the †Maid and summoned to Miss King’s room. The old woman, clearly approaching death, had asked for Ashenden, but when he arrives, she cannot speak. By gazing into her eyes, the always perceptive Ashenden sees that she wants to say something of considerable importance to him, but cannot. She dies in his arms, able only to utter a single word, ‘‘England.’’ Bibliography: Ashenden; Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Calder (1972/ 1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974).
MISS SADIE THOMPSON (1953). The title of the third film version of *Maugham’s short story *‘‘Rain’’ (1921), produced by Columbia Pictures and starring Rita Hayworth (1918–1987) and Jose Ferrer (1912–1992). Bibliography: Halliwell.
THE MIXTURE AS BEFORE (1940). A collection of short stories. According to *Maugham in his foreward to this book, ‘‘When my last volume of short
182
THE MOON AND SIXPENCE
stories was published [Cosmopolitans (1936)] The Times [of London] headed their review of it with the title ‘The Mixture as Before.’ This of course was meant in a depreciatory sense, but I did not take it as such and so I have made so bold as to use it for the collection which I am now inviting the public to read.’’ Actually, the title comes from the phrase common among British pharmacists when refilling prescriptions. The stories include *‘‘Gigolo and Gigolette,’’ *‘‘The Facts of Life,’’ *‘‘The Lion’s Skin,’’ *‘‘Lord Mountdrago,’’ *‘‘The Lotus Eater,’’ *‘‘A Man with a Conscience,’’ *‘‘An Official Position,’’ *‘‘The Three Fat Women of Antibes,’’ *‘‘The Treasure,’’ and *‘‘The Voice of the Turtle.’’ Bibliography: Pritchett.
THE MOON AND SIXPENCE (1919). A novel, published in London by *William Heinemann (in a first edition of 6,000 copies) and in New York the same year by Doran; reprinted by Arno Press (1977) and by Dutton/ Signet/Penguin USA (1995). Edith Elias wrote a stage version that opened at New Theatre, London, on 24 September 1925, starring Henry Hinchcliffe Ainley (1879–1945) as †Charles Strickland and running for seventy-five performances. In 1943, United Artists produced the film version, starring George Sanders (1906–1972) and *Herbert Marshall (1890–1966). NBC television produced a ‘‘special’’ on 30 October 1959, starring Laurence Olivier (1907–1989), and the novel has been recorded by Caedmon (1986). This work represents the fruition of *Maugham’s interest in the French painter *Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), which had begun in 1905 with his meeting and subsequent discussions with the painter’s Irish friend *Roderick O’Conor (1860– 1940). Simply, Maugham wove Gauguin into the then popular artist-as-outcast theme, fine-tuning it with equally popular undercurrents of the ruthless, antisocial, and temperamental artist deserting his conventional European environment for the hard, good, and nonmaterialistic life on the exotic island of *Tahiti. Further, the work stands as but another example of Maugham’s attack upon women, in which he maintains that the sex contributes little to the advancement of art or to the artist; indeed, he saw art and love as being incompatible, and almost every act of Charles Strickland underscores that notion. Insofar as concerned the title, Maugham supposedly explained that it referred to a person reaching for the moon and missing the sixpence at his feet. In his portrait of the forty-year-old Charles Strickland, Maugham develops the common, affluent, and insignificant London stockbroker on the Exchange who suddenly and permanently leaves his wife of seventeen years and goes off to Paris to study art. For her part, †Amy Strickland possesses the same degree of common insignificance as her husband, and she simply cannot understand why he would desert her, throw away his life in England, or direct his passion toward the life of an artist. In fact, after Strickland’s death, Amy has little or no idea how or why her husband has achieved fame. At one point, for the benefit
THE MOON AND SIXPENCE
183
of the †Narrator, Strickland has identified Amy as an excellent woman, but he also wishes that she were in hell. Consumed by his desire to paint, Strickland, while in Paris, neglects his physical needs. He meets †Dirk Stroeve, a Dutch friend of the Narrator and himself a painter, who lives with his English wife, †Blanche Stroeve. Stroeve appears somewhat of a buffoon who definitely lacks talent. As a young man, he had won an art scholarship to study in Amsterdam; from there he went to Italy, then on to Paris and a studio in Montmarte. Totally opposite from her husband in appearance and personality, the tall and beautiful Blanche had been a governess in the family of a Roman prince, where the son of the house had seduced her. When Strickland becomes ill, Stroeve insists, over Blanche’s opposition, that he come to their house where his wife can nurse him. In so doing, she falls in love with Strickland, who takes over Dirk’s studio after he recovers. Stroeve orders him out, but Blanche threatens to leave if that happens. So, the hapless Stroeve becomes the one who departs, even providing his faithless wife with money on which to live. Strickland paints a nude portrait of Blanche and, when finished, walks out on her. He saw in her only an excellent model but regards the portrait as a failure. Blanche commits suicide by swallowing a dose of oxalic acid. Following her death, Dirk returns to the studio, intent upon destroying the painting. However, he cannot carry out that act, for he recognizes in the picture a superb creation. He then returns to Holland to live with his mother. Charles Strickland proceeds to Marseilles, wanders about for a time, then goes off to Tahiti. There he marries †Ata, a seventeen-year-old Protestant native girl who lived at the Hotel de la Fleur and had never been touched but by captains and first mates. Her ‘‘relative’’ and the hotel proprietress, †Tiare Johnson, had performed the marriage ceremony. Maugham endows Tiare with physical qualities that carry the simple reality of the South Sea paradise to an extreme, as the Narrator tells us that she had ‘‘arms like legs of mutton and breasts like giant cabbages.’’ At any rate, Ata bears Strickland’s children and carefully tends to his needs, while her husband does nothing but paint. His work comes under the scrutiny of †Capitaine Rene Brunot, a middle-aged Frenchman and former naval officer, who purchases two of his pieces for his son and daughter living in Paris. Brunot also admires the beauty of the primitive home that Ata has created for her husband, but for which the latter appears to have no particular appreciation. However, Strickland’s health again declines. Upon consulting with an old French physician, †Dr. Coutras, he discovers that he has leprosy. Coutras, by the way, represents another among the few characters in possession of one of Charles Strickland’s paintings, given to him by the artist as payment for his diagnosis. Strickland continues to paint, concentrating upon the walls of Ata’s and his bungalow, until he becomes blind. Living in darkness, he remembers his last paintings, his masterpieces. However, he demands that Ata destroy the paintings on the walls after his death. A year later, when Dr. Coutras calls upon Strickland, he finds the painter dead. Of greater importance, he becomes the
184
MOROCCO
only Westerner to see the strange paintings that cover the walls of the isolated bungalow. The aged Dr. Coutras digs Strickland’s grave with his own hands, and Ata faithfully carries out her husband’s orders by destroying the bungalow. Thus, even as he lapsed into, and endured, his blindness, even as he deteriorated toward death, and even though at one point he wishes that his children might some day see his pictures, Charles Strickland remained the rigid, uncompromising artist—or, perhaps more accurately, the artist who refused to compromise with the hypocritical conventions of his society. Bibliography: Brander; Brophy; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Curtis and Whitehead; Halliwell; Loss (1987); Menard (1968); Morgan; Pfeiffer; Raphael (1976); Viswanath.
MOROCCO. On 30 March 1950, *Maugham and his secretary/companion *Alan Searle left the Riviera for Morocco, where Maugham had a letter of introduction to Marshal Alphonse-Pierre Juin (1888–1967), the French governorgeneral (1947–1951). The entire visit proved uneventful, and the two returned to the *Villa Mauresque before the end of spring. Biography: Morgan.
MORRICE, JAMES WILSON (1865–1924). Canadian postimpressionist painter. Born in Montreal of a wealthy Scottish merchant family, Morrice initially studied law but abandoned that discipline for art. He went to Paris in 1890 and became a pupil at the Academie Julien, then studied with the French landscape painter and engraver Henri Harpignies (1819–1916). Fairly early in his painting career, Morrice came under the influence of the American James Abbot MacNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and Charles Conder (1868–1909), the English painter. From 1890, he lived mostly in Europe, North Africa, and the West Indies. As his reputation increased, he became friends with the French painter *Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Pierre-Albert Marquet (1875–1947) and the English artist Richard Sickert (1860–1942). Morrice introduced into Canadian art the decorative advantages of color and became known as the pioneer of ‘‘pure’’ painting, as opposed to the mere photographic depicting of local scenery. Thus, he concentrated on landscapes and figure studies, mostly in oil. His influence upon Canadian painters remains strong. Morrice belonged to the crowd of English and American writers and visual artists who frequented, early in the twentieth century, the upstairs room of the Chat Blanc Cafe´, located near the Gare Montparnasse, Paris. *Maugham met him through his Irish portrait painter friend *Gerald Kelly sometime during 1904–1905. Upon learning that Maugham was indeed a licensed physician, Morrice would ‘‘consult’’ him on the ‘‘welfare’’ of art and artists, filtering his standard joke through a series of descriptions of obnoxious diseases. In Maugham’s novel *The Magician (1908), James Wilson Morrice appears as the
‘‘MR. HARRINGTON’S WASHING’’
185
small and bald †Warren, the always drunk and very nearly great painter who functioned as a delightful interpreter of Paris. Bibliography: Buchanan; Morgan; Pepper.
‘‘THE MOTHER’’ (1909). A short story, initially published in 1909, revised slightly, and then included in the collection *Creatures of Circumstance (1947). Set in a back street of La Macarena, the roughest quarter of Seville, *Spain, the piece focuses upon the harsh code of passion and revenge, unfolding the events that explain a woman’s murderous love for her son. The forty-year-old mother of †Currito Sanchez, †La Cachirra (Antonia Sanchez), moves from Triana to the tenement house in La Macarena. Her facial expression of ferocity and her isolation from the rest of her neighbors underscore the fact that just one month ago, she had completed her seven-year term in prison for murder of her former lover, †Pepe Santi. The handsome twenty-year-old Currito represents her only meaningful possession, and ‘‘she adored him with a fiery jealous passion that demanded in return impossible devotion.’’ A threat to that possessive adoration appears in the form of one of La Cachirra’s neighbors, †Rosalia, daughter of †Pilar; the girl quickly captures Currito’s attention and affection. Naturally, La Cachirra threatens Rosalia to keep away from her son; the young man, in turn, reduces the frequency of the Sunday visits to his mother’s rooms, which only intensifies her anger and jealousy. She confronts Rosalia, who tells her that she and Currito plan to marry. For that, the girl receives La Cachirra’s knife in her back. When led away by the police, the mother, upon learning that she has killed Rosalia, expresses her thanks to God. Bibliography: Collected Short Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance; Curtis (1974); Stott (1973).
‘‘MR. HARRINGTON’S WASHING’’ (1928). A short story, part of the sequence *Ashenden; or, the British Agent. Based on Maugham’s experiences as a British espionage agent in Petrograd, Russia, during August–October 1917, the piece concerns an incident involving an American businessman who refuses to leave Petrograd before he retrieves his laundry. As a result, he is shot in a riot. *Maugham had heard of the actual incident, involving an American banker, from a Czech agent named Emanuel Voska. The title character, †John Quincy Harrington, a compulsive talker and a bore who represents a firm in Philadelphia, spends eleven days with the narrator/ writer/agent †Ashenden on a train from Vladivostok to Petrograd. As one would expect, Maugham occupies most of Ashenden’s time with listening to his traveling companion’s discourses on his family, his reading habits and tastes, and American and British literature. He exasperates Ashenden, but Ashenden does not totally despise him. There exists in Harrington a sincere streak of kindness and affection for his fellow human beings. In a word, Harrington is ‘‘absurd but lovable.’’
186
‘‘MR. KNOW-ALL’’
When they arrive in Petrograd, they part company, which leaves Ashenden free to pursue his mission of contacting †Professor Z, the leader of the Czechs in Russia, who would assist in trying to keep the *Kerensky government from leaving the war and making a separate peace with Germany. Three Czechs, led by †Dr. Egon Orth, have been sent to Russia to assist him with that project. Harrington reenters the picture, since he needs an interpreter for his business propositions with the Kerensky government; Ashenden arranges to have Dr. Orth fill that position. The progress of those events becomes somewhat untracked with the introduction and discussion of the affair between Ashenden and the voluptuous †Anastasia Alexandrovna Leonidov, whose husband, †Vladimir Semenovich Leonidov, conveniently lives in exile in England. The episode really goes nowhere; Anastasia will not divorce Vladimir, since that act will only lead to his suicide. Thus, the two can only ‘‘suffer.’’ Returning to the issue at hand, Ashenden, Dr. Orth, and Anastasia Alexandrovna proceed in their attempts to keep Russia in the war. For his part, Mr. Harrington ‘‘wanders through it all,’’ unaware that, while trying to complete his business arrangements with Kerensky, history was in the making. To expedite matters, Anastasia Alexandrovna turns her charm and attention upon Harrington, who somehow manages to get Kerensky’s worthless signature on his business enterprise. In the middle of events and schemes comes, on 17 November 1917, the Bolshevik revolution. Ashenden and Harrington must leave the country, while Anastasia Alexandrovna opts to remain. Harrington will not leave until he retrieves his laundry, and with rifle fire rattling about the streets, he rushes from the hotel for it. In the end, Ashenden and Anastasia Alexandrovna find him lying on the pavement in a pool of blood, his hand clutching ‘‘the parcel that contained four shirts, two union suits, a pair of pyjamas and four collars.’’ Bibliography: Ashenden; Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Calder (1972/ 1973).
‘‘MR. KNOW-ALL’’ (1936). A short story included in the collection *Cosmopolitans. In 1950, with *‘‘The Verger’’ and *‘‘Sanatorium,’’ it became part of a film entitled *Trio, produced by Paramount Studios. †Max Kelada, a vulgar Levantine who deals in pearls and claims to be British, shares a cabin with the †Narrator on a voyage from San Francisco to Japan. The Narrator despises him for claiming to know everything about anything, and his fellow passengers refer to him as ‘‘Mr. Know-All.’’ At their dining table sit †Elmer Ramsay, a member of the American Consular Service stationed at Kobe, Japan, and his overly modest wife, †Mrs. Ramsay, who has spent a year in New York without her husband. At dinner she wears about her neck a string of pearls that she claims to be an imitation worth only the $18 that she paid for it. Max Kelada quickly estimates its value as anywhere between $15,000 and $30,000, and Elmer Ramsay wagers him $100 that it is worth only what his wife paid for it. Kelada is about to win his wager when he spies the terror in Mrs. Ramsay’s eyes; he
MRS. CRADDOCK
187
quickly admits that she is right and turns the $100 over to Ramsay. Thus, Max Kelada turns out to be a gentleman who saves a lady’s reputation and marriage at the expense of his own. ‘‘ ‘If I had a pretty little wife,’ ’’ he tells the Narrator, ‘‘ ‘I shouldn’t let her spend a year in New York while I stayed at Kobe.’ ’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans; Curtis (1974).
MRS. BEAMISH (1917). A play; unpublished and never produced. *Maugham recycled parts of it into his 1920 (written 1919, produced 1921) comedy *The Circle. Bibliography: Fielden (1956); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b).
MRS. CRADDOCK (1902). A novel, written in 1899 and published in November 1902 in London by *William Heinemann (*Maugham’s first book with that firm) and in New York (1920) by Doran; reprinted by Arno Press (1977) and Penguin Books (London, 1979). Heinemann’s editors originally refused the piece, as did Hodder and Stoughton. However, the former reconsidered, with the provision that Maugham delete a certain passage (that Maugham restored in a 1955 edition) relative to ‘‘her flesh crying out to his flesh’’ that the publisher considered offensive. At age twenty-one, tall and handsome †Bertha Ley, the orphaned niece of †(Mary) Polly Ley, has lived with her aunt for three years at Court Leys, between Leanham and Blackstable, Kent. Polly, the sister of †Betty Vaudrey, a forty-seven-year-old spinster, passionately devotes her efforts to the preservation of her own liberty. The well-educated, sensitive, and middle-class Bertha falls in love with †Edward Craddock and a month after her majority marries him, which allows Polly to leave Court Leys and establish lodgings in London. At age twenty-seven, Edward Craddock, although several steps below Bertha Ley on the social ladder, emerges as tall, massive, and generally unemotional, a regular and rugged individual who appears the picture of health. The son of a tenant farmer at Bewlie’s Farm, also between Leanham and Blackstable, he has been educated at St. Regis School, Tercanbury, Kent. His interests focus almost solely upon himself and his property; in his view, women fit firmly into the latter category. He stands for, and wins election to, the County Council and becomes a model farmer, squire, and landlord. After a difficult pregnancy, Bertha gives birth to their child, a boy, stillborn, and the doctor tells her that she cannot have another baby. She bursts into a passionate fit of tears, realizing that all of her hopes, dreams, and desires for happiness and independence have been swept away. Bertha Craddock leaves Court Leys for a six-week stay with Polly Ley, then accompanies her aunt to Paris. Upon returning to Court Leys, she realizes that she no longer loves Edward. Following a respectable interval, Bertha leaves her husband a second time and accompanies Polly Ley to Rome and to London.
188
MRS. DOT. A FARCE IN THREE ACTS
Earlier, she had met Polly’s nephew, †Gerald Vaudrey, the pretty nineteen-yearold-son of †General and Betty Vaudrey and Polly Ley’s ne’er-do-well nephew (as well as Bertha’s cousin). Having been expelled from Rugby and then dismissed by a series of crammers (tutors), Gerald has been philandering violently with his mother’s maid. General Vaudrey gave him £500 and told him to go to the devil. After returning to London from Florida, he falls in love with Bertha Craddock, and she with him. However, their relationship goes no further than that, and Gerald leaves for America (with ‘‘her flesh crying out to his flesh’’). Through all of this Edward continues to concern himself with the affairs of Court Leys, while Bertha begins to have dreams and visions of his death. On one actual occasion, he is thrown from his horse during a hunt, breaking his collarbone. He recovers and, some time later, riding the same horse in another hunt, takes another fall. On this occasion, however, Edward does not recover but dies. Maugham sarcastically reminds his readers that Craddock’s only fault during his vigorous life appears that his wife once loved him but then ceased to do so. In reality, Bertha Craddock had been trapped by the marriage, her husband refusing to return or even consider her boundless passions. After losing their baby, there appears no way out but the taking of her own life. Aunt Polly and Gerald Vaudrey provide brief respites but do not solve her problems. Suicide might be her only exit, but, fortunately, Edward’s second fall from his horse opens the door to her freedom. Bertha, now somewhat over thirty years of age, looks pale but nonetheless retains her beauty. She then burns Edward’s photograph and letters. Bibliography: Brander; Brown (1970); Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1977); Curtis and Whitehead; Heywood (1967); Jonas (1959/1972); Loss (1989/1990, 1987/1988), Morgan; Raphael (1976); Stott (1973); Viswanath; Ward.
MRS. DOT. A FARCE IN THREE ACTS (1912). A play, produced at the Comedy Theatre, Haymarket, London, on 27 April 1908; the first *Maugham play produced by *Charles Frohman (1860–1915); directed by *Dion Boucicault the younger (1859–1929), starring *Marie Tempest (1864–1942) and running for 272 performances; also produced in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Petrograd; published at London by *William Heinemann (1912) and in Chicago by Dramatic Publishing (1912). The play, a satirical portrait of Edwardian society, considers the absurd marital dilemmas plaguing the upper classes caused essentially by an excess of time, money, and extravagance. The title character, †Frances Annandale Worthley (Mrs. Dot: a pun on the French word dot, meaning ‘‘dowry’’), a widow, owns Worthley’s Entire and Worthley’s Half Crown Family Ale (Maugham’s original title of the play). She receives pleasure from giving away money, an item that everyone wants. The issues become involved when her vivacious, twenty-twoyear-old nephew, †Freddie Perkins, educated at Eton and Oxford, falls in love with †Eleanor (Nellie) Sellinger. At age twenty-one, Nellie, for the past three years, has been engaged to Freddie’s friend, †Gerald Halstane, to whom her
MRS. DOT. A FARCE IN THREE ACTS
189
pompous mother, †Lady Sellenger, has refused permission to marry her daughter. To unify matters, Mrs. Dot falls in love with Gerald Halstane and schemes successfully to get Gerald away from Nellie and marry him herself. In the end, Freddie runs off with Nellie. One need also consider the snappy machinations of †James Blenkinsop, a wealthy bachelor, age forty-five and Eton-educated, who represents the well-preserved man of fashion. Bibliography: Collected Plays, I; Barnes; Brander; Burt; Cordell; Curtis (1977); Dottin (1937); Ervine (1933; 1935a); Halliwell; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan; Stokes.
N THE NARROW CORNER (1932). A novel published in November at London by Heinemann and in New York by Doubleday, Doran, and Company; reprinted by Arno Press in 1977 and Pan in 1978; Warner Brothers produced a film version in 1933, starring Ralph Bellamy (1904–1991) and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (1909–). Although the critics did not react kindly to the novel, it proved popular, particularly in the United States, where Doubleday sold 67,073 copies. Depending upon one’s theological or philosophical leanings, the title of the piece may refer first to the Meditations of Roman stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius Antonius (121–180): ‘‘Short therefore is man’s life, and narrow is the corner wherein he dwells’’; or the path may lead to St. Matthew (7:14), wherein Christ tells us that ‘‘strait is the gate and narrow is the way, which leadeth into life, and few there be that find it.’’ Set in the Dutch East Indies island of Banda Neira (the Twin Islands), which *Maugham fictionalized as Kanda Meira, the novel may appear, on the surface, as a mystery-adventure story. †Fred Blake (not his real name), a native of Brisbane, Australia, had been involved with a terribly unattractive but married woman, †Florie Hudson; her husband, †Patrick Hudson, a railroad worker at Sydney and member of the Australian Labour Party, holds considerable influence among the Irish and Italian workers. Upon the discovery of Florie with Fred, a scuffle ensues, and Patrick Hudson is shot with his own gun. Fred’s father, †Jim Blake, the biggest lawyer in Sidney and an important political figure in New South Wales, arranges a change of identity for his son (thus the name Fred Blake) and ships him off with †Captain Tom Nichols aboard the small and shabby pearling lugger, the Fenton. Nichols, who has been sailing the Archipelago for thirty years, lost his certificate over trouble with an insurance company. He may be a complete rogue, as well as a murderer, cheat, and liar, but
THE NARROW CORNER
191
Maugham likes him. Meanwhile, Florie must face the coroner’s jury, whose members claim her to be temporarily insane. Suspected of her husband’s murder but never accused, she hangs herself; with the absence of Fred Blake, the murder remains unsolved. Fred’s fate appears no better. He wins a large amount of money from Nichols and ends up at the bottom of the ocean. Nichols claims that he got drunk at Batavia and threw himself over the side of the Fenton. However, the piece also exists on a higher level that allows Maugham to expound, through various characters, on his own philosophies about how life ought to be. Aboard the Fenton and at Kanda Meira with Blake and Nichols one finds †Dr. Saunders, an English physician and eye specialist who has lost his license in England for unethical practices. He has been, for the past fifteen years, practicing his profession at Fou-chou. He smokes opium daily but in moderation, as prepared by his nineteen-year-old Chinese servant boy, †Ah Kay, and he inclines toward the teachings of Buddha. Not only does he possess Maugham’s short physical stature, but, as do Maugham’s countless narrators of his countless stories, Saunders observes life with benevolent detachment, concluding that misfortunes have their compensations and that humor and common sense, in the end, always seem to make amends for the ridiculous commissions and omissions of the human race. Thus, practically everything that goes on in the novel tends to be filtered through the mind’s eye of Dr. Saunders. On Kanda Meira, Captain Nichols and his party come across an Englishman, †George P. Frith, a widower whose wife died only a year ago from heart disease. Frith resides with his daughter, †Louise Frith, on a nutmeg farm. Educated at a small public school and then at Cambridge, Frith had taught school for a time; he left England, operated a bookshop in *Singapore, and managed a hotel on Bali. For the last four years he has been working on a translation of The Lusiad (Os Lusiados, The Lusitanians, 1572), the national epic of Portugal by the Lisbon-born poet Luis de Camoens (1524–1580). He also provides space in his house for his father-in-law, †Jack Swan, who actually owns the plantation. In one of his demented states, Swan had torn up pages representing a year’s work of Frith’s translation of Camoens; instead of flying into a rage, the Brahman Frith resigns himself to the fact that the old man has merely destroyed several dozen sheets of paper that represented a mere illusion of reality. The total task and poem itself remain indestructible. Frith’s beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter, Louise, had been sent to school at Auckland, New Zealand, but returned to Kanda Meira after her mother’s death. She is somewhat engaged to †Erik Christessen, a tall and powerfully built Dane in his twenties. A Lutheran who became an atheist and then converted to Brahmanism by Frith, Christessen has the benefit of a University of Copenhagen education and represents a Danish company on Kanda. Initially in love with Louise’s mother, †Catherine Frith, he currently and unofficially is engaged to Louise. However, Louise, not really wanting to be possessed by anyone, turns her attentions upon Fred Blake and has a brief affair with him. That results principally in Christessen’s shooting himself, for he discovers that Louise has
192
‘‘NEIL MACADAM’’
not fulfilled his ideal of the pure and virtuous woman. Erik’s act does not affect Louise one way or the other, for she understands that, despite the former’s fundamental honesty and integrity, he did not love her but wanted only to possess her. Of course, she had no real love for Fred Blake. Thus, at the end, Louise achieves complete freedom. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Loss (1987/ 1988); Morgan; Viswanath.
‘‘NEIL MACADAM’’ (1932, 1933). A short story, first published in 1932 and included in the collection *Ah King (1933). Set in the *Federated Malay States at ‘‘Kuala Solor,’’ *Borneo, the piece revolves about the title character, the twenty-two-year-old androgynous but puritanical and nondrinking Scotsman †Neil MacAdam. The nephew of a Glasgow merchant, the holder of an honors degree from the University of Edinburgh, as well as a trained taxidermist, he comes to Kuala Solor as assistant to the museum curator, †Angus Munro. Prior to his arrival, he had stopped in *Singapore, to be met and guided further by Munro’s friend †Captain Bredon. When Bredon tries to engage Neil with several of Singapore’s ladies of the night, the young Scot will have none of them. Invited to lodge at Munro’s house, MacAdam meets his superior’s beautiful thirty-five-year-old wife, the Russian †Darya Munro. A devotee of Russian literature and an obvious nymphomaniac, she relentlessly pursues MacAdam, and he spends considerable time trying to evade her advances. When Munro and MacAdam plan an expedition through the jungle to hunt for specimens on the little-known Mount Hitam, Darya suddenly comes upon the scene to accompany them. One day, when Munro has gone off to confer with a village headman, Darya traps Neil into a nude swim—an erotic episode considering the times. Then follow days when she totally harasses the young man and assumes a role somewhere between mother and lover. However, at one point she goes off by herself, gets lost in a storm, and perishes. Sin vanishes; virginity survives. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Cordell; Morgan.
NICHOLS, JOHN BEVERLEY (1898–1983). English journalist, author, composer, and playwright. Born at Long Ashton, Bristol, the youngest of three sons of the wealthy solicitor John Nichols and his wife, Pauline Zoe Lillian Shalders, he received his education at a preparatory school in Torquay, Devonshire, then at Marlborough College and Balliol College, Oxford. World War I interrupted his undergraduate studies, and he obtained a commission as a second lieutenant in the Royal Army Labour Corps. However, Nichols’ homosexual activities caused problems and a transfer to Cambridge to instruct officer cadets in military strategy. He then became an aide to Sir A. E. Shipley, whom he accompanied during October–December 1918 to the United States with the Universities Mission. During that period, Nichols completed a novel, Prelude (1920), based upon his days at school. Returning to Balliol in 1919, he revised the magazine Isis
NIEHANS, PAUL
193
(begun in 1892 and discontinued on 13 June 1914), began (1919) the political journal Oxford Outlook, and gained the presidency of the Oxford Union. In 1921, he earned a degree in history. Nichols embarked upon a career as a journalist, eventually publishing his diary with the Sunday Chronicle, beginning in 1932. Prior to that, however, he had produced the novels Patchwork (1921) and Self (1922). His autobiography, Twenty-Five, appeared in 1926, and a year later he published an autobiographical novel, Crazy Pavements. He wrote the music and words for six stage shows, and five of his plays focused upon such social issues as violent sports, abortion, and alcoholism. During the 1930s Nichols sported about London with a lover, Cyril Butcher, a drunken clerk turned actor. In A Case of Human Bondage (1966), he condemned Maugham’s attack (‘‘Looking Back’’ [1962]) upon *Syrie Barnardo Maugham, and in Father Figure (1972), he accused his own father of family cruelty. Nichols died on 15 September 1983 in Kingston Hospital following a fall in the music room of his home. *Maugham and Nichols had been friends for a time before the former wrote a glowing review of his Twenty-Five for the Sunday Times as a birthday present for the young writer. Although not necessarily one of his lovers, Maugham did look upon the extremely handsome Nichols as ‘‘precious’’ and ‘‘sweet.’’ The long relationship came to an abrupt end in 1962, following the publication of Maugham’s vitriolic ‘‘Looking Back.’’ Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1977); DNB (1981–1985); Morgan; Nichols; Tercentenary Handlist of English and Welsh Newspapers, Magazines, and Reviews.
NIEHANS, PAUL (1882–1971). Swiss surgeon born in Bern on 22 November 1882, the son of a physician whose wife, Anna, claimed herself the illegitimate daughter of King Frederick III of Prussia (1831–1888). Before studying medicine, Niehans had been interested in religion and philosophy, even to the point of earning a doctorate in theology. After his medical education, he engaged in a successful medical practice, and by 1920, although his methods proved unusual but not unorthodox, he had amassed impeccable credentials. At some point in 1920, Niehans came under the influence of a Russian surgeon, Dr. Serge Voronoff (1866–1951), a serious but eccentric practitioner who pioneered the transplanting of glands. Voronoff in 1920 began his monkey gland treatment, grafting slices of chimpanzee testicle in male patients. During the 1920s, Niehans became an authority on the endocrine glands and experimented successfully with glandular transplants. In 1931, he received a desperate call from a clinic at Lausanne. A surgeon, while operating on a woman to remove her thyroid, had also erroneously removed most of the tiny parathyroids. That action caused the calcium level in the blood to fall, resulting in the cramped condition of tetany and threatening the woman’s life. Niehans injected the woman with fragments of parathyroid from a freshly killed calf, thus bringing about her recovery and laying the basis for what he would term frische
194
NIEHANS, PAUL
zellen (cell therapy). At the same time, Niehans shifted his focus from the legitimate practice of medicine to a pseudoscience through which, by some mysterious process, cells taken from animal organs and injected into patients would revitalize the corresponding human tissues. Niehans could never really or fully explain how it all worked. He applied the process against specific diseases and conditions, including anemia, heart damage, certain form of diabetes, both high and low blood pressure problems, and impotence. In addition, he claimed that he could enlarge underdeveloped bosoms and relieve *homosexual tendencies in men and women. In later years, Niehans even announced that cell therapy would help to ward off cancer. However, Niehans’ major focus for the process concerned his treatments for overcoming the physical deteriorations of old age. To his picturesque Clinique La Prairie, near the affluent Montreaux end of Lake Geneva, came the wealthy and the famous of the world for their Thursday morning shots of fresh cells administered into their buttocks: *Noel Coward (1899–1973), *Winston Churchill (1874–1965), King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia (1880?–1953), the painter Georges Braque (1882–1963), Edward Duke of Windsor (1894–1972), German chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967), Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974), Bernard Baruch (1870–1965), Thomas Mann (1875–1955), the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (1890–1966), the film actresses Merle Oberon (1911–1979) and Gloria Swanson (1899–1993)—and *William Somerset Maugham. Neihans maintained that he rejected nine out of ten patients, choosing only those who had demonstrated a certain degree of value to society by their individual prominence. The procedure relied almost exclusively on sheep; the ewe’s fetus would be removed, then the required tissues minced together, made into a fluid, and, no more than two hours later, injected into the patient. Reportedly, Niehans came to London in 1951 to treat the dying King George VI of England (1895–1952), and evidence exists of his visit to the Vatican in 1954 to do the same for Pope Pius XII (1876–1958). On the strictly imaginative level, in a long, drawn-out, and ghoulish 1973 film, Ash Wednesday, starring Elizabeth Taylor (1932–) and Henry Fonda (1905–1982), an aging American beauty rejuvenates herself with a dosage of cells after receiving a traumatic face-lift. She then leads a vivid sex life and leaves her stolid husband. Prior to World War II and continuing almost immediately thereafter, the area surrounding La Prairie had become a favorite retreat for actors, writers, and film directors looking for low taxes and privacy. Patients to Niehans’ clinic would arrive on Monday for examination and the Aberhalden test, a urine enzyme reaction test developed by the Swiss physiologist Emil Abderhalden (1877– 1950). Then they would have to lodge in a local hotel until Wednesday afternoon, when they gained actual admission to the clinic. The Monday tests would have been analyzed in sufficient time to have the procedure ready for Thursday morning, on which day certain assistants slaughtered the animals, and other assistants administered the cell injections. Patients, segregated and taking all of their meals in their rooms so as not to reveal their identities, remained in the
THE NOBLE SPANIARD
195
clinic until the following Tuesday. Upon being discharged, they were told to refrain from alcohol and tobacco for three months. From 1925 and at least once each year following, the frail Maugham, who suffered from recurrent tuberculosis and malaria, visited usual spas at Vichy in central *France; Badgastein in central Austria; or Brides-les-Bains in Savoy, France. In addition, beginning September 1938, at age sixty-four until his death on 15 December 1965, Maugham visited Paul Niehans’ Clinique La Prairie on three occasions for the rejuvenation treatments. Since Maugham had fairly close relationships with Coward, Churchill, and the duke of Windsor, he could well have heard of Niehans’ clinic through any one of them. That he was willing to pursue such a scientifically questionable treatment really demonstrates how far he had removed himself from his medical training at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London. At any rate, in company with *Alan Searle, who had not yet become his secretary, the writer arrived at La Prairie on 7 September 1938, where Niehans himself gave them a tour of the large chalet and the private slaughterhouse stocked with pregnant ewes. Apparently, Searle suffered from severe psoriasis over his entire body, and Niehans promised him a cure. When, in May 1962, Alan Searle took the eighty-eight-year-old Maugham to La Prairie, he hoped that Niehans’ cell therapy would restore the writer’s deteriorating mental condition. Niehans administered a series of injections but did not guarantee results. Bibliography: Ferris; Hannon; McGrady; Morgan.
THE NOBLE SPANIARD: A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS, ADAPTED FROM THE FRENCH OF GRENET-DANCOURT (1953). A play, produced first at the New Royalty Theatre, Dean Street, London, on 20 March 1909, starring Fanny Whiteside Brough (1854–1914), E. Lyall Swete, Kate Cutler, and Charles Hawtrey (1858–1923); another production at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, on 15 October 1910; revived at London in 1954; published in London by Evans Plays (Evans Brothers Limited) in 1953, with reprints in 1954, 1961, and 1970. This adaptation of Ernest Grenet-Dancourt’s Les Gaites du Veuvage (The Gaiety of Widowhood), written at the request of Sir Charles Hawtrey and set in Boulogne in 1850, has a slight but highly comic and therefore entertaining plot. The hero and title character of the piece, †Ferdinand Francisco Maria de Lomas y Oria, Duke of Hermanos, has been termed ‘‘as regular as the tides and more persistent than a dun.’’ He spends most of the play trying to find and engage in a duel a husband who has long since died. The object of his search, †Jack Nairne, broke his neck within two years after his marriage to †Marion Nairne; obviously, he liked gin and water more than he did his wife. Marion, his wealthy widow, proves the true object of the Duke’s search, for he loves her and wants to marry her. Marion, perpetually languishing for a romantic suitor but also hinting that her husband still exists, also happens to be the sister of †Lucy Proudfoot, an eighteen-year-old beauty engaged to a captain of dra-
196
‘‘THE NOBLEST ACT’’
goons, †Adolphus Chalford. Finally, the parents of Lucy and Marion, †Matilda and †Judge Sebastian Proudfoot, complete the farcical activities. Matilda, who had brought £30,000 to her marriage, sits about quoting Lord Byron and talks about being thrown in a sack into the Bosporus, while Sebastian, although terribly pompous, loves a good joke. Because Jack Nairne no longer exists, the Duke of Hermanos challenges virtually every other male character in the piece to a duel, suspecting him of being Marion’s husband. Thus, Sebastian Proudfoot believes that the Duke is after Matilda, while Captain Chalford, being the complete military man, looks forward to the exercise with the Duke. A third prospect, the French †Count de Moret (he has an English wife named †Kate), accepts the challenge, but before anything can happen, Marion Nairne rushes forward, identifies her true self and marital status, and the Duke embraces her to his bosom. Bibliography: Brander; Dottin (1937); Ervine (1935a); Hartnoll; Stokes.
‘‘THE NOBLEST ACT’’ (1942). A short story, published initially in This Week, 4 January 1942. †Katie Farley and her husband, †Dr. Jim Farley, have been in the *Federated Malay States for the past thirty years, and in thirteen days will return to England. Their †Children have been in England since the oldest was only nine years old; they have now grown but are almost total strangers to their parents. In England, Mrs. Farley hopes to regain her health, although a *Singapore doctor has given her but a year to live. However, because of the war and the fact that Jim’s replacement cannot come over from England, †Meadows, the Colonial Secretary, wants him to stay on. Actually, Jim wants to stay, but he also knows how much Katie wants and needs to return to Yorkshire. In the end, she agrees to remain with him, thus assuring her death. Bibliography: A Traveller in Romance.
O O’CONOR, RODERICK (1860–1940). Irish painter. Partly educated in England, O’Conor went to Antwerp, Belgium, in 1881, where he studied painting for two years before moving on to Paris. There he studied under the French portrait painter Charles Carolus-Duran (1837–1917), then attached himself to Paul Cezanne (1839–1906) and the impressionists, whose style he essentially adopted. In 1889 and 1890, O’Conor exhibited his paintings at the Salon de Independants and at the Salon d’Automne, displaying no fewer than ten works during the latter year. He spent every summer at the small village of Pont-Avon, where in 1894 he became friendly with *Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). Indeed, along with Armand Seguin, he became a constant companion of Gauguin, the two being the only visitors encouraged to call upon the artist when he exiled himself to Tahiti. Although critics largely considered O’Conor a gifted painter, they claimed that he lacked the power of expression. A highly cultivated person, he read widely in French and English, studied the Latin masters, collected books, and proved a discriminating buyer of modern French paintings and Japanese and Indian sculpture. A music lover, he played the violin, but not well or seriously. His private income allowed him to enjoy a number of pleasures; he traveled from mistress to mistress and generally proved a favorite among the ladies. A collection of his paintings and drawings sold at the Hotel Drouot, Paris, on 6– 7 February 1956. O’Conor belonged to the raucous crowd of English and American writers and artists who frequented the upstairs room of the Chat Blanc Cafe´, near the Gare Montparnasse, Paris. *Maugham met him through *Gerald Kelly at some point during 1904–1905, but the two never really became friends. O’Conor appeared first in Maugham’s novel *The Magician (1908) as †Mr. O’Brien, an Irish
198
OF HUMAN BONDAGE
painter who recognized his own failure. Then Maugham recycled him for a second appearance in the autobiographical *Of Human Bondage (1915) as another artist, †Clutton, a fellow student with †Philip Carey at Amitrano’s art school, Paris, whose face appears as long as that of a horse. In one episode, an interesting foreshadow of what would come four years later (1919) as *The Moon and Sixpence, Clutton discusses with Philip Carey a stockbroker friend of his whom he had met in Brittany and who had gone off to Tahiti to paint. In fact, during 1904–1905, O’Conor had unknowingly suggested the theme of the 1919 novel to Maugham, after which the writer spent considerable time haunting O’Conor’s studio, working terribly hard at encouraging the sullen and ill-tempered painter to talk about Gauguin and their relationship. In April 1962, when the aged Maugham auctioned his paintings at Sotheby’s, London, Lot Number One consisted of O’Conor’s ‘‘Still Life with Vegetables.’’ Bibliography: Purely for My Pleasure; Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1977); Danielsson; Morgan.
OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1915). A novel; published in New York on 12 August by George H. Doran, in a printing of 5,000 copies and selling for $1.50; issued at London on 13 August by *William Heinemann in a printing of 5,000 copies and selling for six shillings; New Haven, Connecticut, in 1938, with an introduction by *Theodore Dreiser; an abridged edition, New York, 1952, Pocket Books, Inc./Cardinal Editions, with an introduction by W. Somerset Maugham; New York, 1956, Random House/Modern Library edition, introduction by Richard A. Cordell (which turned out to be the largest selling book of that series); reprinted 1978 by Penguin Books. By 1923 the novel had gone through four printings; by 1946, it was selling in excess of 30,000 copies per year, and as late as 1951, a signed first-edition copy sold in the United States for $400. The film versions began in 1934 with the RKO production starring Leslie Howard (1890–1943) and *Bette Davis (1908–1989); remade by Warner Brothers in 1946, starring Paul Henreid (1908–1992) and Eleanor Parker (1922–); remade in 1964 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, starring Laurence Harvey (1928–1973) and Kim Novak (1933–). Metacom produced a recording in 1948. In April 1946, Maugham donated the manuscript of Of Human Bondage to the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Of Human Bondage constitutes the second version of *Maugham’s highly autobiographical but nonetheless fictional chronicle of the first thirty years of his life. The first attempt, covering only twenty-four years, went under the title of ‘‘The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey,’’ which he began working on at some point in 1897 and had rewritten at least once prior to August 1899. Maugham would later consider it a 90,000–word first draft of the book eventually published in 1915. After failing to obtain a publisher, Maugham let the manuscript ‘‘age’’ until, fifteen years later, he rewrote it completely. When he donated the manuscript to the Library of Congress in 1950, he stipulated that it
OF HUMAN BONDAGE
199
never be published. For the title of the second version, Maugham chose ‘‘Beauty from Ashes,’’ from Isaiah 61:3—‘‘Give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.’’ However (according to his preface to a 1936 reprinting), when he learned that the title had already been chosen by another writer, he went to the title of one of the books from the Ethica (1677) of the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), ‘‘Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions‘‘—his purpose being to move his principal character (or himself) toward the following section of Spinoza’s work, ‘‘Of Human Freedom, or the Control of the Understanding.’’ Critically, Of Human Bondage has been considered an excellent example of the realistic novel and belongs in the first rank of fiction written during the socalled transitional period from 1880 to 1920. Because of the large number of characters and equal quantity of episodes, the piece does not yield to easy summation. At its broadest base, Maugham focuses upon his hero, †Philip Carey, who from the very outset confronts tragedy and cruelty, not only from the persons close to, and around, him but from the very nature of his birth. His congenital deformity, a clubfoot, forces him to seek, essentially, the company of himself and his own thoughts. At age nine, Philip has been brought to his mother’s bed after she has just delivered a stillborn baby boy. He then must live with his uncle and aunt, †Reverend William Carey, vicar of Blackstable, Kent, and his wife, †Louisa; the couple, both in their middle to late fifties, have no children and obviously see young Philip as somewhat of an intrusion upon their regular and comfortable provincial existence. Educated at King’s School, Tercanbury, where he does fairly well, tries terribly hard to make friends, and generally endures an unhappy existence, Philip leaves and goes off to Heidelberg, presumably to learn German. There he meets †G. Etheredge Hayward, who increases his knowledge and awareness of ideas and great books. The two remain friends for a number of years until Philip comes to recognize Hayward as a hollow person. Returning to Blackstable with a very small mustache, nineteen-year-old Philip meets the affable and worldly †Emily Wilkinson, daughter of the †Reverend Wilkinson; William Carey had been his curate at a village in Linconshire. At an age calculated at somewhere between twenty-seven and thirty-nine, she has been a governess in *Germany and *France. Her principal virtues appear to be her slight French accent and thick, ungainly ankles. Miss Wilkinson not only provides Philip Carey with voice lessons and a series of romantic stories relative to her Continental experiences but introduces him to the life of love. However, Philip finds her distasteful and breaks off their relationship, and Miss Wilkinson goes off, eventually to marry a widower. Following a short term as an articled clerk to a London accounting firm, Philip proceeds to Paris to become an artist. At Amitrano’s art school he meets the serious, silent, unhealthy-looking twenty-six-year-old †Fanny Price. Although not really in love with Fanny, Philip makes attempts to become friends with
200
OF HUMAN BONDAGE
her. In her own way, Fanny tries to complement Philip’s art education. Actually, she loves Philip but knows that nothing will come of their relationship. In the end, she hangs herself, realizing the hopelessness of her love and that she will eventually die from starvation. After Fanny’s burial at a cemetery at Montparnasse, Philip senses the pain that Fanny must have suffered from the hopelessness of her love, and he comes to understand the terrible cruelty that love can bring. However, Fanny does not constitute the only aspect of Philip’s Paris experience. He also meets a number and variety of artists who, if nothing else, introduce him to the equally numerous and varied experiences of life. The poet †J. Cronshaw heads that list, described succinctly as a pea poised on an egg. Between the hours of 9:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M., he presides at La Closerie de Lilas, a Paris cafe´. He reveals to Philip ‘‘the figure in the carpet,’’ the notion that each person must weave his own pattern in the great carpet that life spreads before him. A close follower of English cricket, Cronshaw had been dismissed for drunkenness from the staff of an English newspaper in Paris but eked out a living doing odd jobs for the same firm. The father of two children with a vulgar French woman, Cronshaw later contracts pneumonia and moves to London. In the end, he dies in his sleep from cirrhosis of the liver at Philip Carey’s residence in Kensington, London. After two years in Paris and following the death of his Aunt Louisa, Philip returns briefly to Blackstable before moving to London. There he enrolls as a medical student at St. Luke’s Hospital. During his early days there, he meets and falls in love with †Mildred Rogers, a waitress in a London tea shop who possesses only moderate physical and somewhat manly attractiveness and even less moral virtue. The ignoble and vain Mildred constitutes the principal chain around Philip’s neck, a bondage that he clearly recognizes but appears incapable of breaking. She lives with him, leaves him, comes back to him, and, seemingly, he can do nothing about it. He provides for her and her illegitimate child by a married man, †Emil Miller, who had left her when he found her pregnant. Mildred then falls in love with †Harry Griffiths, a handsome fifth-year medical student and Philip’s friend; Harry had nursed him through a serious bout of influenza. Eventually, Mildred ‘‘vanished [but only temporarily] into the anonymous mass of the population of London’’ but resurfaces as a London streetwalker. She lives in a room in Highbury with her baby, but then moves in with Philip. She drains him of his money and, in a senseless passion, ruins a number of his possessions. They finally part, and Mildred returns to the street. One must also take note of another object of Philip Carey’s affection, †Norah Nesbit. Twenty-five years of age, separated from her husband, and with one child, the pleasant but ugly Norah functions, under the name of ‘‘Courtenay Paget,’’ as a writer of penny novelettes and part-time actress. She really loves Philip; again, however, Philip, when loved, cannot bring himself to return that love. After Philip has lost all of his money, he discovers (or is rescued by) and moves in with the family of †Thorpe Athelny, a jovial journalist and the press
OF HUMAN BONDAGE
201
representative of Lynn and Sedley, a linen drapery firm in Regent Street, London. At age forty-eight, he met Philip while a patient at St. Luke’s Hospital, there suffering from a sharp attack of jaundice. For eleven years, Athelny served as the secretary of the English water company at Toledo, Spain. He had also been a worker on a tea plantation in Ceylon, a traveler in America for Italian wines, a police court reporter for an evening newspaper, subeditor of a paper in the midlands, and editor of a paper on the French Riviera. He enjoys a common marriage with his former maid, †Betty Athelny, and the nine illegitimate children alive out of the twelve she bore him. From Thorpe Athelny, Philip Carey learns about humility, wisdom, and the acceptance of a modest station in life. The observations of the routine pleasures experienced by the Athelny family serve as the principal means by which Philip learns that he can actually escape from his bondage. In the end, Philip becomes a shop floorman at Lynn and Sedley’s and, following the death of the Reverend William Carey, returns, at age thirty, to St. Luke’s Hospital to receive his physician’s diploma. He spends a pleasant month as a substitute assistant to †Dr. South, a crusty but kindly old man who resides at Farnley, Dorsetshire. He offers Philip a partnership, but the latter declines. Appointed assistant house physician at St. Luke’s, Philip asks the Athelnys’ oldest daughter, †Maria del Sol (Sally), to marry him. Healthy, animal-like, and feminine, Sally had first been Philip’s mistress. Although she definitely lacks the excitement offered by Mildred Rogers or the love and even the understanding of Norah Nesbit, she will provide Philip with the calm and the peace that no other woman had heretofore offered him. On his way out of Spinoza’s human bondage and toward human freedom and the control of the understanding, Philip Carey demonstrates the capability of a rational young man to shed the shackles of pure animal passion. Certainly, the lessons of, and the paths to, that freedom have been difficult, painful, and costly, but he has been guided by a strong and steady sense of reality. He always knows where he is and why he got there. Philip also exists as a historically transitional figure. Unlocking the restrictions of Victorian social and religious values, he searches for meaning in a truly modern world. He learns also that to achieve happiness, one must first endure pain; contentment and inner peace represent the offspring of tragedy. The artistic significance of Of Human Bondage arises from knowing that, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, the young Maugham had set his sights clearly and steadily toward the next 100 years. If his contemporaries *H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley understood the role of science and technology for the twentieth century, Maugham as well understood the complex roles to be performed by future modern but imperfect human beings. Bibliography: Braendlin; Brander; Brewster and Burrell; Brophy; Brown (1970); Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Curtis and Whitehead; Dreiser; Epstein; Horne and Pringle; Jonas (1959/1972); Loss (1989/1990); Morgan; Mortimer; Naik; Palmer;
202
‘‘AN OFFICIAL POSITION’’
Pollock; Raphael (1975–1976, 1976); Spence; Stott (1973); Vidal; Viswanath; Ward; Webster; Whitehead; Wilson.
‘‘AN OFFICIAL POSITION’’ (1937). A short story published initially in 1937 and included in the collection *The Mixture As Before (1940). Set on the island of St. Laurent de Maroni, the large penal settlement in French Guiana, the story concerns a convict-camp executioner who prepares for his first guillotining. †Louis Remire, a fifty-year-old widower and former policeman from Lyons, serves a twelve-year sentence for killing his wife, †Adele, a dressmaker and an intolerable woman whom he had gotten pregnant before their marriage. From among 200 applicants, Remire had been chosen the public executioner. The immediate task at hand focuses upon the execution of six men who had escaped a year ago and only recently recaptured. A brutish but inexperienced †Turnkey who had murdered a farmer and his wife functions as a substitute for his regular assistant, and Remire demonstrates his competence and conscientiousness by explaining in detail the procedure for carrying out justice in the name of the French people. The procedure, by the way, pays him 100 francs per head. *Maugham spends most of the story, however, detailing the events leading first to the death of Remire’s predecessor and second to Remire’s recollection of the murder of Adele, the trial that followed it, and Remire’s life on St. Laurent de Maroni prior to his appointment as executioner. At the conclusion of these reminiscences, Remire readily admits that he is indeed leading a happy life on the island, and he owes all of his contentment to his shrewish wife. On the way to the execution, five or six men attack him; they knife him in the chest, rip open his belly, and cut his throat from ear to ear: in the name of the French people, justice is done. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; The Mixture As Before.
ON A CHINESE SCREEN (1922). A volume of fifty-eight short travel sketches on *China, initially serialized in the American Bookman and published in October 1922. In 1954, *Maugham donated the manuscript of the volume to Yale University. Maugham originally intended these sketches as notes for a longer book, but that project never came to fruition. The sketches comprise miniature portraits, character vignettes, brief landscape descriptions, anecdotes, fictional re-creations of events, some snatches of poetry, and bits of philosophy. The more memorable pieces include ‘‘The Fannings,’’ a portrait of an unselfish wife and mother; ‘‘Rain,’’ a confession of nostalgia; ‘‘The Grand Style,’’ a tribute to a gentleman; ‘‘Romance,’’ an unexpected tolerance and understanding of mysticism; ‘‘The Beast of Burden’’ and ‘‘Song of the River,’’ two pieces that depict the harassment of Chinese coolies; ‘‘The Servants of God’’ and ‘‘The Old Timer,’’ illustrating the humility and good works of Catholic missionaries and being general tributes to old age. Interestingly, such characters as †Dr. Saunders and †Captain Tom Nichols, who would appear later in such novels as *The Narrow Corner (1932) and *The Razor’s Edge (1944), had been recycled
OUR BETTERS. A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS
203
from these sketches, as well as the majority of the secondary characters in the 1925 novel *The Painted Veil. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Morgan.
THE OPIUM ADDICT (1929). A narrative included in *The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) but published separately in the year preceding. The narrator finds himself in a Haiphong hotel, drinking a Dubonnet and waiting for a ship to *Hong Kong. What unfolds becomes essentially a variation of the short story *‘‘Mirage’’ from *On a Chinese Screen (1922). Again, this exists as but another example of the *Maugham recycling process—in this instance, the movement of a piece, beneath a different title, from one collection to another. Bibliography: Gentleman in the Parlour; Maugham Reader; Stott (1973).
ORIENTATIONS (1899). A collection of six short stories published in June by *T. Fisher Unwin (in an edition of 2000 copies) and dedicated to Mrs. E. F. Johnson, the wife of the British vice-consul at Seville, Spain. Includes *‘‘A Bad Example,’’ *‘‘The Choice of Amyntas,’’ *‘‘Daisy,’’ *‘‘De Amicitia,’’ *‘‘Faith,’’ and *‘‘The Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian’’ (*Maugham’s first published story in the trilingual magazine Cosmopolis, October 1898). Bibliography: Stott (1973).
OUR BETTERS. A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS (1923). Written in 1915 and produced by John D. Williams at the Hudson Theatre, Forty-fourth Street, New York, on 12 March 1917, for 112 performances; opened in London at the Globe Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, on 12 September 1923 for 548 performances; revived in London in October 1946 at the Playhouse, Theatre, directed by Peter Lauderdale Daubeny (1921–1975); published in London by *William Heinemann in 1923 and in New York by Doran in 1924. RKO Radio Pictures produced a film version in 1933, starring Constance Bennett (1904–1965) and Gilbert Rowland (1905–1994). The play represents *Maugham at his cynical and satirical best as, through the vehicle of the comedy of manners, he flails away at the idle wealthy in Britain and America who have nothing to do and nowhere to go but continually seek to expand their meaningless social horizons. †Elizabeth (Bessie) Saunders, an American heiress, visits her sister, †Lady Pearl Grayston, a native of New York. Her husband, †Lord George Grayston, an Englishman with not very much money, wants to live in the country and have a baby every five minutes. Lord George resides in Abbots Kenton, Suffolk, when Pearl lives in London, then moves to London when Pearl entertains in Suffolk. Bessie’s former fiance´, †Fleming Harvey, also on a visit to England, enters, and Pearl determines to introduce him into the proper social circles, consisting mostly of expatriated Americans. However, Pearl plans to engineer a marriage between Bessie and
204
‘‘THE OUTSTATION’’
young, pleasant, but penniless †Lord Harry Bleane, whose mother grows lavender in Kent. Among the American expatriates, the Virginian †Thornton Clay does little but socialize and spend money, while †Arthur Fenwick, a profiteering and thus wealthy food provider to the working classes of the United States, maintains Pearl Grayston as his mistress and calls her ‘‘girlie.’’ †Princess Flora Della Cercola, formerly Miss Van Hoog, separated from †Prince Marino Della Cercola, doles out her money to charity, and the Duchess †Minnie de Surennes, formerly Miss Hodgson from Chicago and divorced from †Gaston, Duke de Surennes, maintains †Anthony Paxton, a parasite half her age and in love with Lady Pearl Grayston. The piece moves forward when Lord Bleane proposes to Bessie Saunders, and Paxton confesses his love to Lady Pearl. The scene shifts to the Graystons’ country estate in Suffolk, where the great debates go forward on the values of the aristocracy, the weakness of the American social system, and the contrast between the English aristocracy and the American wealthy. The discussions prove almost absurd, since the Americans cannot understand the traditions and structure of British society. Nonetheless, Bessie Saunders accepts Harry Bleane’s proposal of marriage; Minnie Surennes and Tony Paxton argue over their insecure relationship, and Paxton and Pearl arrange for a rendezvous in the teahouse. In the midst of a poker game, Paxton and Pearl are discovered, and the play advances to its final act. Following others’ assaults and insults relative to Lady Pearl’s character, Paxton declares that he will leave for the colonies, which leads Minnie Surennes to declare that she will marry him. Arthur Fenwick agrees to forgive Pearl, but not before Bessie learns of the arrangement between Fenwick and her sister. Pearl counters by telling her sister that Fenwick’s money brought about such possibilities as allowing her to marry Lord Bleane. That prompts Bessie to withdraw her acceptance of Bleane’s proposal, and she announces her departure for America. The piece arrives at its end when former relationships have been repaired and restored, order has returned, and Pearl knows that all of her hypocritical societal schemes will continue to maintain their former priorities. Bibliography: Collected Plays. II.; Maugham Reader; Six Comedies; Barnes; Burt; Dottin (1937); Hartnoll; Loss (1987); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan; Whitehead (1987).
‘‘THE OUTSTATION’’ (1924). A short story first published in 1924 and included in the collection *The Causarina Tree (1926). Events in the isolation of a jungle outpost at Sembulu, *Borneo, magnify the strong differences in the social backgrounds of the fifty-four-year-old Eton- and Oxford-educated †George Warburton, the Resident, and his assistant, †Allen Cooper, the only two white men in the area. Despite his strict and absurd adherence to social decorum, Warburton proves a just and competent colonial administrator. Openly disdainful of, and rude toward, his superior and the natives, the thirty-year-old Cooper, born and educated on Barbados, comes from among the people—out
‘‘THE OUTSTATION’’
205
of the ranks. The two simply get on each other’s nerves. Cooper eventually meets his end at the hands of †Abasa, his Dyak native servant, whose wages he has held back because of a behavior problem. Warburton actually warned Cooper that the native would react badly; perhaps he could have even taken measures to prevent his assistant’s death, but his hatred for the man is so deep that he does nothing. With his assistant out of the way, the Resident can resume, in utmost peace and satisfaction, the extreme formality of his daily routine. In this study of snobbishness, *Maugham tells us that the situation could have occurred only in the colonies; in England the two men would never have met. Next to *‘‘Rain,’’ critical commentators have considered this the best of Maugham’s short stories. Bibliography: The Casuarina Tree; Collected Short Stories. I. East and West; Cordell; Grotz; Morgan; Moskovit.
P ‘‘P. & O.’’ (1923). A short story first published in 1923 and then included in *The Casuarina Tree (1926). †Mrs. Hamlyn, age forty-eight, discovers that her fifty-two-year-old husband of twenty years, a silk merchant in Yokohama, is having an affair with †Dorothy Larcom, a woman of fifty. In indignation, she leaves for England and a divorce. On board the ship, she meets †Gallagher, an Irish planter and estate manager returning to Galway from the *Federated Malay States after having been there for the past twenty-five years. He has had the hiccups since he first boarded the ship. Confined to his room and then transferred to the ship’s hospital, he eventually dies from his malady, reportedly the direct result of a spell cast upon him by the fat native Malay mistress he left behind. †Mr. Price, in charge of the machinery on Gallagher’s estate, relays to Mrs. Hamlyn the details surrounding the curse of Gallagher’s mistress. Further, the young †Doctor, recently qualified and from Edinburgh, had been looking for a leisurely voyage and an affair with †Mrs. Linsell; instead, he must deal with the trauma of Gallagher’s condition. After Gallagher’s death and his burial at sea, Mrs. Hamlyn recognizes the relative insignificance of her husband’s infidelity; she writes to forgive him and wishes him nothing but happiness. Bibliography: The Casuarina Tree; Complete Short Stories. I. East and West.
‘‘THE PACIFIC’’ (1921). A short narrative sketch included in the short story collection *The Trembling of a Leaf; not a part of any editions of *Maugham’s collected short stories. Bibliography: Trembling of a Leaf.
THE PAINTED VEIL (1925). A novel serialized in New York in Hearst’s International magazine from November 1924 to March 1925, then in the London
THE PAINTED VEIL
207
Nash’s Magazine from December 1924 to July 1925; published in book form in April 1925 at New York by Doran and in London by *William Heinemann, with an issue of 8,000 copies; in England, the novel went through five initial printings totaling 23,000 copies; additional reprints from April 1925 through May 1928; further reprints from December 1935 to 1967; reprinted Arno Press (1977) and Penguin Books (1979). Bartlett Cormack wrote a stage version (which *Maugham revised) in 1931, first performed on 19 September of that year at the Playhouse theater, London, starring Gladys Cooper (1881–1971). In 1934, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced a film version starring Greta Garbo (1905–1990) and *Herbert Marshall (1890–1966); the same studio produced another version in 1957 under the title *The Seventh Sin. Maugham borrowed the title of the novel from the lyrical drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), Prometheus Unbound (1820), in which The Earth responds to a question from Asia, saying, ‘‘Death is the veil which those who live call life; / They sleep, and it is lifted. (3:3:113–114).’’ Although the writer again takes up the issue of the degeneration of the British character once people transfer from the mother country and settle in the colonies, he does take pains to allow their virtues an opportunity to display themselves and to compete with their vices. †Kitty Fane, a beauty from the time she was a child, lives in *Hong Kong with her husband, Dr. †Walter Fane, a government bacteriologist. Kitty’s problem has evolved from her mother, †Mrs. Garstin, a hard, cruel, managing, ambitious, parsimonious, and stupid woman whose major concern focused upon the marriages of Kitty and her sister, †Doris, and the management of her unambitious husband, †Bernard Garstin. Specifically, Kitty married Walter in a panic at the ‘‘late’’ age of twenty-five. The piece opens with Kitty in bed with †Charlie Townsend, the assistant colonial secretary at Hong Kong, husband of †Dorothy Townsend, and the father of three boys. Although the tall, athletic, vain, cowardly, and self-seeking Charlie loves Kitty and is bored with Dorothy, he will not seek a divorce, since he has aspirations of being a colonial governor. Walter knows of Kitty’s extramarital activities but does nothing until the opportunity arises for him to leave Hong Kong for the cholera-infested city of Mei-tan-fu. He threatens Kitty with divorce unless she accompanies him. Once in the infested and death-ridden Mei-tan-fu, Kitty begins a minor but fragile transformation. She meets the ugly but spiritually attractive †Waddington, the deputy commissioner who has developed an eccentric freedom, full of fads and oddities. He lives with a †Manchu Woman who had abandoned the wealth and comfort of a wealthy family and followed him from Hankow. Volunteering to work at the French convent to care for the babies and younger children, Kitty comes in contact with a group of simple, honest, and kindly nuns, headed by †Odette, the Mother Superior. A dignified woman between the ages of forty and fifty and not without physical beauty, she tempers her authority with Christian charity, and Kitty comes to admire her dignity, control, and discretion in the midst of impending tragedy. Kitty then discovers that she is with
208
PARAVICINI, CAMILLA
child and becomes concerned lest it be born amid the pestilence of Mei-tan-fu. However, at the height of his magnificent self-sacrifice, Walter comes down with cholera, and he dies quoting Oliver Goldsmith: But soon a wonder came to light, That shew’d the rogues they lied, The man recover’d of the bite, The dog it was that died. [Vicar of Wakefield (1766) ‘‘An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog,’’ 17:8:4]
Waddington reads the funeral service at Walter Fane’s burial, and Kitty confesses relief over his death, for his passing has brought her freedom. Kitty leaves Mei-tan-fu and returns to Hong Kong, where she stays with the Townsends. However, she cannot control her attraction to Charlie Townsend, even though she admits that she no longer loves him. The real key to Kitty’s character comes from the mouth of Charlie Townsend’s wife, Dorothy, who maintains that it is not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with Charlie are so uncommonly second-rate. In the end, Kitty sails for England. Her father, by now a sixty-year-old widower, has been appointed Chief Justice of the Bahamas. Kitty will live with him and have her baby there. The Painted Veil has received mixed critical reaction. The French have considered it a classic piece of fiction, while in England, although there arose positive comments about its structure, certain moralists among the critical crowd complained of too much paint and too little veil. Further, critics have always wanted to draw comparisons between Walter Fane and Somerset Maugham, while the writer continued to maintain that he had modeled the character of the cold scientist after his older brother and jurist, Frederick Herbert Maugham. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Dottin (1928); Loss (1987/1988); Morgan; Raphael (1976, 1977); Stott (1973); Viswanath.
PARAVICINI, CAMILLA (1941–). Daughter and younger child of *Vincent Paravacini and *Elizabeth Mary (Liza) Maugham, born in New York City; granddaughter of *William Somerset Maugham and *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome Maugham. In late 1945, as Camilla’s parents’ marriage neared its end, Maugham established a trust fund for her brother Nicholas and her. By 1954, according to her grandfather, the thirteen-year-old Camilla promised to be a great beauty, and Maugham saw the potential for his becoming a great-grandfather. In June 1962, at age twenty-one, she married *Bluey Malvoleon, the son of the head of a Greek shipping firm. The event came in the midst of Maugham’s litigation with his daughter, Liza, which may have been one reason he did not attend the wedding (or, perhaps, had not even been invited to the event). Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
PARAVICINI, ELIZABETH (LIZA) MARY MAUGHAM (1915–). See MAUGHAM, ELIZABETH (LIZA) MARY.
PARKER, DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD
209
PARAVICINI, NICHOLAS SOMERSET (1937–). Son and older child of *Vincent Paravicini and *Elizabeth (Liza) Mary Maugham, born in London; brother of *Camilla Paravicini Malvoleon; grandson of *William Somerset Maugham and *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome Maugham. He spent World War II with his mother and sister in the United States while their father served with the British army at various stations in the world. By 1947, he had grown to a height of six feet and two inches. Although toward the very end of his life, the mentally and physically deteriorating Maugham had on at least two occasions treated his grandson badly by first admonishing and then totally ignoring the young man, one of the wreaths present at the writer’s funeral at King’s School, Canterbury, on 22 December 1965, read, ‘‘To Grandpa, Rest in Peace, Nick.’’ Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
PARAVICINI, VINCENT (fl. 1930–1955). The son of the Swiss minister to England; the first husband of *Elizabeth (Liza) Mary Maugham; father of *Nicholas Somerset Paravicini and *Camilla Paravicini Malvoleon; the first son-in-law of *William Somerset Maugham and *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome Maugham. At the time of his marriage to Liza Maugham in May 1936, the fairly tall, athletic, dark, but not swarthy Paravicini numbered among the best-looking men in London. By March 1940, he had become a naturalized British citizen and, that May, joined the British army. For the greatest part of the war, he remained separated from his wife and children, Liza having taken her children to the United States. In February or March 1942, the army posted Paravicini to Australia, then, in 1943, to New Guinea with the rank of lieutenant colonel in an armored car unit. In the midst of his unit’s being transferred from the Pacific theater to Italy, Paravicini managed to visit his family in New York, but all the while suffering from malaria and dysentery. Instead of Italy, the army dispatched him to Washington, D.C., to lecture on tank warfare, and the proximity to Liza and the children temporarily saved their marriage. Vincent Paravicini apparently returned to England prior to the arrival of Liza and the children, and by the time (1944) his family had left New York for London, Maugham had received rumors of his son-in-law’s heavy drinking and gambling. However, by late 1945, the marriage proved beyond saving—most likely the result of the lengthy wartime absence. The divorce from Liza became finalized in February 1947. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990) Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
PARKER, DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD (1893–1967). American writer and journalist, born in West End, New Jersey, the daughter of Henry Rothschild, a wealthy garment manufacturer in New York City, and Eliza Marston Rothschild (d.1893). She received her early education in a convent. Known for her wit and humor, Parker will always be remembered by such acid comments as, when referring to Katharine Hepburn (1907–) in one of her stage roles, that the actress ‘‘ran the whole gambit of emotions from A to B’’; or by the oft-repeated couplet,
210
PARKER, DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD
‘‘Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.’’ She began her career as a serious writer and editor, producing widely read and highly respected essays. In 1917, she married Edwin Pond Parker II, a Wall Street broker, but the marriage ended in separation in 1919 and divorce in 1928. She joined Vanity Fair as a theater reviewer in 1918; however, the magazine fired her in 1920 for writing hard-hitting and cynical reviews. She then went over to The New Yorker and reviewed books in a regularly featured column, ‘‘Constant Reader.’’ Her stories, poems, and essays appeared in the The New Yorker for over thirty years. In 1951, she attracted the attention of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee because of her loose associations with communist organizations. Parker’s poetry tends to be light, satirical, flip, cynical, and concise, focusing upon such themes as frustrated love and idealism tarnished by modern living. Individual volumes for that poetry—Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928), and Death and Taxes (1931)—have come together in Not So Deep as a Well (1936). She published short stories and sketches in Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasure (1933), collected in 1939 as Here Lies. Later collections include her Collected Stories (1942), Collected Poetry (1944), The Best of Dorothy Parker (1952), and A Month of Saturdays (1971). Parker and her second husband, actor Alan Campbell (?–1963), with whom she lived from 1933 until their divorce in 1947 (they later remarried), wrote motion picture scenarios— some twenty-two scripts alone for Paramount Pictures between 1934 and 1936— at a joint salary of $5,200 per week. During the Spanish civil war (1936–1939) Parker went to *Spain as a war correspondent. With Jean d’Usseau, she wrote a two-act play, Ladies of the Corridor (1933), about the lonely lives of wealthy widows in a New York City hotel. After Campbell’s death, Parker returned to New York, where she lived alone until her death. *Maugham first met Dorothy Parker in Los Angeles in January 1941, sitting next to her at a dinner hosted by the actress/comedienne Fanny Brice (1891– 1951). He told the American writer that he owned all of her books in red leather bindings, and they went on to discuss the state of English literature. In Maugham’s introduction to The Portable Dorothy Parker (New York: Viking Press, 1944, p. 13), he indicated that Parker had, at his request at that dinner, furnished the following lines for him: Higgledy Piggledy, my white hen; She lays eggs for gentlemen. You cannot persuade her with gun or lariat To come across for the proletariat.
Early in 1943, Maugham invited Parker to spend some weeks with him at his house on the *Nelson Doubleday plantation at Yemassee, South Carolina. She remained for three weeks, even though she looked askance at the presence of a number of young men who wanted nothing to do with women. Finally,
PEN CLUB
211
Maugham did, for a fee of $250, write the introduction to the Viking portable edition of Parker’s works. Bibliography: DAB, Supplement vol. 8, 1966–1970; Morgan.
THE PARTIAL VIEW (1954). The title of a volume containing the autobiographical essay *The Summing Up (1938) and *A Writer’s Notebook (1949), with a preface by *Maugham and published by William Heinemann. PAYNE, ADNEY WALTER (?–1949). Theater manager, born at London, the son of the music hall impresario George Adney Payne. He received his education at the City of London School and Heidelberg University. A barrister of the Middle Temple from 1899, Payne had become a chartered accountant, having graduated in 1897 from the Royal Institute of Chartered Accountants. In 1910, he assumed charge of his father’s theatrical music hall interests. He served as chair and managing director of the London Pavilion, Ltd., and of Variety Theatres Consolidated, Ltd.; director of Moss Empires, Ltd., and Victoria Palace, Ltd.; and president (1924) and vice president of the Society of West End Theatre Managers. During World War I, Payne directed the Outside Organization and Munitions’ Tribunals for the Ministry of Munitions, and he became the chief resettlement officer for the London and South of England Demobilization and Resettlement Department. After the war, he served (1919–1920) as deputy controller of the Civil Liabilities Military Service Department. In 1933, Payne wed blond, beautiful, and thrice-married Claire Beatrice Wisinger, the daughter of the wealthy Ida and Mor Wisinger of Budapest, Hungary. He died, ultimately, from injuries received during the German blitz of London in 1940. *Maugham and Payne met at Heidelberg sometime during 1890–1891, and shortly after Maugham completed his medical studies at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London, in 1897, he and Payne became roommates at a variety of London flats—an arrangement that would last until 1917. They would remain friends and correspondents until Payne’s death in 1949. In August 1909, the two rented a cottage at the Rectory Farm, Taplow, Buckinghamshire. At the outset of Maugham’s literary career, Payne read and criticized his fiction and plays, as well as lent him money. Maugham’s first novel, *Liza of Lambeth (1897) bears the dedication, ‘‘To my good friend, Adney Payne.’’ Payne also helped Maugham with his play contracts and through the complexities of taxes. In the early stages of Payne’s marriage, whenever Maugham visited London, he would stay with the couple at their house in No. 15 York Terrace. However, he and Claire Payne did not like each other, and Maugham removed his belongings. Upon Payne’s death, Maugham requested that she return his letters to her husband; when she did, he destroyed them. Bibliography: Curtis (1977); Morgan; Who Was Who. 1941–1950.
PEN CLUB. The Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists, an international organization founded in 1921 by Mrs. Catharine Amy
212
PENELOPE: A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS
Dawson-Scott (1865–1934), the London poet and writer of popular short fiction and novels. In addition to PEN, she founded, during World War I, the Women’s Defense Relief Corps to train women to replace men called into the military service; the Tomorrow Club (1917); and the Survival League (1921). The English playwright and novelist *John Galsworthy (1867–1933) served as the first president of PEN. Essentially, the organization set out to promote cooperation among writers throughout the world in the interests of literature, freedom of expression, and overall international goodwill. According to the novelist *H. G. Wells (1866–1966), who succeeded Galsworthy as president of PEN, the literary societies initially served only for amiable exchanges among the writers of the same and different countries. However, with the violent persecution of Jewish and leftist writers in Germany in 1933, as well as an attempt to seize and manipulate the Berlin PEN Club for Nazi propaganda, the organization assumed a more meaningful role. Local battles to maintain freedom of expression of letters erupted in Berlin, Vienna, and Rome, and in Russia, writers fought to decontrol literary activities and form a free and independent PEN Club in Moscow. Wells fought hard to protect the liberal principles of PEN, particularly the notion that no genuine artist or writer, whatever social or political beliefs he or she espoused, should be excluded from membership. *Maugham held membership in PEN, although his participation in its activities and projects appeared limited. When invited in 1934 to join the executive committee, he declined on the grounds that he spent most of his time away from England and, more importantly for him personally, he loathed meetings. However, the committee ignored his refusal and elected him, informing him in 1935 that he needed only to maintain an attitude of goodwill toward the organization. Maugham did, however, in company with his friend Barbara Back, attend a dinner at the Savoy Hotel, London, on 13 October 1936, in honor of the seventieth birthday of PEN’s current president, H. G. Wells. On that occasion, the eighty-year-old *George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) proposed the toast. In 1936, PEN invited Maugham to attend the organization congress at Buenos Aires, Argentina, with Wells and Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) as the three delegates from Great Britain. Maugham declined. For whatever reasons, he further refused to become involved, at the outset of World War II, with the PEN campaigns to assist refugee writers and to announce a stand against fascism in Europe. In 1938, in response to an appeal from the PEN Club for a contribution to help Austrian refugees, he submitted a check for a ‘‘meager’’ ten guineas and declared that he had, well in advance of the PEN request, already helped to relieve the plight of Austrian Jews whom he knew and who had been forced to leave their country. Bibliography: Drabble; Morgan; Wells; Who Was Who, 1929–1940.
PENELOPE: A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS (1912). A play, produced by *Charles Frohman (1860–1915) at the Comedy Theatre, Pandon Street, in the
PENELOPE: A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS
213
Haymarket, London, on 9 January 1909, running for 246 performances, starring *Marie Tempest (1864–1942), directed by *Dion (Dot) Boucicault (1859–1929) and including *Maugham’s lover, *Ethelwyn Sylvia (Sue) Jones, as the maid †Peyton; produced in New York in the same year and running for 48 performances; revived in London in 1953 for 30 performances; published in London (1912) by *William Heinemann, and in Chicago (1912) by Dramatic Publishing Company. In September 1946, the Soviet Union banned Penelope (as well as *The Circle [1919] in Moscow for representing bourgeois reactionary ideology and morality, as well as an attempt to poison Soviet minds. The title character, †Penelope O’Farrell, married for the past five years to †Dr. Richard (Dickie) O’Farrell, a physician of moderate income, wants a divorce. She has discovered an affair between Dickie and †Ada Fergusson, a close friend of hers whose husband, a naval officer, resides in Malta. O’Farrell, it appears, devotes more time to Ada than to his practice. On the fringes of the triangle stand Penelope’s father, †Charles Golightly, a professor of mathematics who holds to the theory that 2⫹2⫽5; his wife, the good-natured †Isabel Golightly; and Isabel’s brother (thus Penelope’s uncle), the fussy and pompous †Davenport Barlow, who transforms the triangle into a square by being attracted to Ada Fergusson. Professor Golightly convinces Penelope that she has lost Dickie’s love because she no longer appears alluring and/or mysterious to him. Simply, she has been too demanding and attentive. She begins by allowing Dickie to escort Ada to plays and races and by excessive purchases of dresses and hats, which cause her husband to wonder if Penelope knows of his affair with Ada. To jeopardize O’Farrell’s fragile financial position even further, Ada Fergusson insists on borrowing money from him so that she can support her questionable financial investments. At the appropriate moment when husband and wife are left alone, Penelope calmly tells Dickie that she knows of his affair with Ada and their planned trip to Paris. O’Farrell reacts first with surprise that his seemingly welldisguised plans have been uncovered and second with considerable disappointment because of Penelope’s calm attitude. He then cancels the Paris trip with Ada. Golightly’s scheme for a change in his daughter’s treatment toward her husband appears to have succeeded, for Dickie has again become physically attracted to Penelope. He becomes upset when he learns that she plans a weekend motorcar tour. Ada confronts Dickie and threatens to send his love letters to Penelope, at which point he informs her that Penelope has known all along about their affair. When Davenport Barlow invites Ada to accompany him to Paris, one would think that the problem between Dickie and Penelope has been resolved. However, the play ends by her continuing to taunt her husband’s sexual desires and then leaving him for her weekend car ride. The thesis of the piece, of course, resides in the surname of Penelope’s father: in terms of the marriage and the marriage contract, he advises her to go lightly; Penelope, herself, is a Golightly. In other words, the best method for dealing with flirtation
214
PERELMAN, SIDNEY JOSEPH
is to allow it to run its course; go lightly and do not overreact. Such a thesis appears most sensible to those living in the dusk of the twentieth century; in Maugham’s Edwardian England, however, the ‘‘go lightly’’ attitude aggravated the rigid conventions of social decorum and marital conduct. Few playwrights of the period could aggravate as well as Maugham. Bibliography: Collected Plays. I; Barnes; Brander; Brown (1970); Burt; Calder (1972/ 1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
PERELMAN, SIDNEY JOSEPH (1904–1979). American writer, screenwriter, dramatist, cartoonist, and humorist. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Perelman attended Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, before obtaining a position with Judge, a comic weekly magazine that published between 1881 and 1939. In 1934, Perelman began his contributions of short pieces to The New Yorker magazine and eventually gained the reputation for his adept wordplay and zany imagination. He collected and published those essays in such books as Baby, It’s Cold Inside (1970), Eastward Ha! (1948), and Rising Gorge (1961). His plays include One Touch of Venus (1943) and Sweet Bye and Bye, while he wrote two screenplays for Marx Brothers’ movies—Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932). A posthumous volume, The Last Laugh (1981), contains comic sketches and an unfinished autobiography. In 1956, Perelman received an Academy Award for the screenplay of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. He died in New York City on 17 October 1979. *Maugham’s friendship with S. J. Perelman dates from around 1947, although the two writers were familiar with each other’s work long before that. For example, Perelman considered *Cakes and Ale (1930) a model for those attempting the comic novel, and he viewed a number of the short stories as classics of that form. He once stated that if he ever taught literature, he would force all of his students to read Maugham’s autobiographical essay *The Summing Up (1938) and the travel narrative *On a Chinese Screen (1922). Generally, Perelman admired Maugham’s discipline and his technical craft as a writer of fiction. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Contemporary Authors, Vol. 89–92; Morgan.
THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN (1955). A two-act play, performed at His Majesty’s Theatre, London, 27 May 1913; revived in Paris and New York by the Come´die-Franc¸aise in 1955; published only in Theatre Arts, 39 (November 1955): 49–64. *Maugham adapted the piece from La Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1671), the best known of the Court plays of Molie`re [Jean-Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673), as a prelude to a complete performance of Ariadne on Naxos (1912) by Richard Strauss (1864–1949). The perfect gentleman, †Monsieur Jourdain, a wealthy tradesman, determines to storm the barricades of exclusive society. However, he possesses no sense of taste, as witnessed by his arrangements for an elaborate musical entertainment through which, in its entirety, he sleeps. Attempting to add some depth to the
PFEIFFER, KARL GRAHAM
215
piece, his clear, practical, and highly opinionated wife, †Madame Jourdain, remains unsympathetic toward her husband’s ambitions. They have a daughter, †Lucille Jourdain, whose only function is to represent any woman old enough to marry. A †Fencing Master, a †Philosopher, a †Music Master, a †Dancing Master, and a †Head Tailor flit in and out of the piece in their singular efforts to prepare Jourdain for the world of high society and to convey opinions on the states of their arts and crafts. ‘‘I confess,’’ states the Dancing Master, ‘‘that I hunger for a little glory. I am touched by applause, and I hold that in the fine arts it is a torture to display oneself to fools and to submit one’s works to the barbarous judgment of an ass.’’ Added to such commentary, one observes the meaningless sound and sense of †Count Dorante, Monsieur Jourdain’s elegant, condescending, aristocratic, and penniless friend who owes him 1,600 French louis. Dorante fixes his attention upon an attractive widow, †Countess Dorimene. With his wife away for the day, Jourdain provides, in his home and for the benefit of the Countess Dorimene, a lavish banquet featuring exotic foods, dancing cooks, and musicians. Then, for her amusement and pleasure, he presents a complete opera. Dorimene believes it all to be a part of Dorante’s courtship extravagances, unaware of Jourdain as the foolish and actual financier of the affair. The moral of the piece comes with the arrival of Madame Jourdain, who quickly recognizes the absurdity of it and what it all has cost her husband. ‘‘I don’t want spectacles, sir’’ she shouts. ‘‘I can see quite plain enough. I’ve been feeling something was up for a long time, and I’m no fool. It’s disgraceful of a fine gentleman like you [Dorante] to lend my husband a hand in all his tomfoolery. And you, madame [Dorimene], it isn’t pretty or honest for a great lady to make trouble in a family and lead my husband astray.’’ Bibliography: Theatre Arts 39 (November 1955): 49–64; Gruber; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Stott (1973).
PFEIFFER, KARL GRAHAM (1904–?). American educator, scholar, and essayist. The son of David Graham Pfeiffer and Nellie Gross Pfeiffer, he held the baccalaureate degree from the University of Maryland (1926), the M.A. from Columbia University (1929), and the Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1939). From 1939 to 1943, Pfeiffer taught at the (then) State College of Washington at Pullman; then, during World War II, he saw service with the American National Red Cross (1943–1944) and the United Seamen’s Service (1944–1945). Following the war, Pfeiffer joined (1945) the English faculty at New York University, Washington Square Campus. In addition to the usual textbooks and essays required for academic tenure and respectability, Pfeiffer authored some twenty-five articles on miscellaneous subjects for such popular American magazines as Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, and Esquire. On 7 November 1923, *Maugham and his secretary/companion *Gerald Haxton booked themselves into the Shoreham Hotel, Washington, D.C., for the pre-
216
PHILIPS, HARRY
Broadway tryout of Maugham’s play *The Camel’s Back (1923). Maugham wanted to play bridge and, to make up a fourth, Haxton recruited Pfeiffer, then a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Maryland and reportedly a good player. The friendship between Maugham and Pfeiffer, the largest portion of it maintained through correspondence, would last until 1959. In 1937, Pfeiffer had come to the Riviera and had stopped by the front gate of the *Villa Mauresque; however, his shyness prevented him from entering. Then, in September 1941, he visited Maugham in *Hollywood and began to take extensive notes on their conversations. In August 1943, having completed *The Razor’s Edge (1944), Maugham sent a copy of the manuscript to Pfeiffer for review, specifically because his main character, †Larry Darrell, was an American, and Maugham wanted to eliminate any inaccuracies of fact or language. Pfeiffer was in *Hawaii at the time with the Red Cross and never received the package, which came back to Maugham through the mails. By December 1945, Pfeiffer had begun to aggravate Maugham with requests to write articles about him; he even wished to collect and publish selections from fan letters sent to Maugham. However, Maugham put a quick end to the idea by stating that he destroyed, almost immediately upon receipt, such letters. When, in January 1946, Pfeiffer asked him if he might write a piece on Maugham and food, Maugham called the scheme absurd and wrote Pfeiffer that he could do as he pleased but that he would receive no help from the writer. Simply, Maugham believed that Pfeiffer wanted to extract from their marginal friendship as much profit as possible. The end of the relationship came in 1959 with the publication of Pfeiffer’s W. Somerset Maugham. A Candid Portrait (New York: W. W. Norton), with an introduction by Maugham’s writer/friend, *Jerome Weidman. Maugham believed that the book contained little beyond absurd inaccuracies. What really bothered him, however, was that Pfeiffer presented only two options for the critical future of his subject: ‘‘Will he [Maugham] be a good writer of the second rank or will he become a footnote in the histories of literature? He has great prestige but no solid reputation.’’ In the United States, the popular reviewers believed that Pfeiffer had written an interesting analysis of Maugham and his work; the academic critics, however, looked upon it as superficial, anecdotal, and tiresomely repetitious. Bibliography: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1–4; Morgan; Pfeiffer.
PHILIPS, HARRY (fl. 1901–1966). Philips, a native of Staffordshire, attended Oxford University at some point in 1900 or 1901. Thus, he and Maugham probably met while the writer lived in London after he had completed his medical training at St. Thomas’ Hospital. When *Maugham left for Paris in August 1904, following the funeral of his brother, *Henry Neville Maugham, Philips accompanied him in the role of secretary/companion. By that time, Philips had failed his examinations at Oxford and no doubt had little else to do. Similarly,
PINKER, JAMES BRAND
217
at that stage of his literary career, Maugham had little or no need for a secretary. Thus, Harry Philips functioned purely as the latter half of the compound that described his duties. The two occupied a fifth-floor flat at No. 3 Rue VictorConsiderant, near the Montparnasse cemetery. During July–August 1905, he and Maugham went off to Capri, staying at the Villa Valentino and generally enjoying the company of the *homosexual and lesbian expatriate colony there. However, the two men did not always get along with each other, and toward the end of 1905, Philips returned to London, where he eventually married one of the daughters of the wealthy Montefiore family. Maugham did, nonetheless, dedicate his farcical novel *The Bishop’s Apron (1906) to Philips. Philips was still alive as late as mid-September 1966, as proven by his letter to the French Maugham scholar Joseph Dobrinsky, wherein he claimed that the character of †Mildred Rogers in *Of Human Bondage (1915) existed as a composite figure based on certain incidents in Maugham’s early life. Rather than being a total woman, Mildred, according to Philips, represented a ‘‘youth.’’ Bibliography: Dobrinsky (1976); Morgan.
PICASSO, PABLO (1881–1973). The Spanish painter and sculptor, born in Malaga, Andalusia, who did most of his work in *France. At age fourteen, he entered the Academy at Barcelona and painted the Girl with Bare Feet (1895). In 1897, he went on to Madrid for advanced training, but he became disillusioned at his masters and he spent most of his time in cafe´s and brothels. He would emerge, however, as one of the significantly prolific and influential artists of the twentieth century. Picasso excelled in painting, sculpture, etching, stage design, and ceramics. With Georges Braque (1882–1963), he launched the nonobjective school of painting and sculpture known as ‘‘cubism’’ (1906–1925), characterized by the reduction and fragmentation of natural forms into abstract, often geometric structures usually rendered as a set of discrete planes. Picasso also introduced (c.1918) the technique of collage, as exemplified by The Three Musicians (1921). Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906–1907), Horta de Hebro (1909), and Guernica (1937) have been identified as principal among his masterpieces. Picasso died at age ninety-two at Mougins, France. In October 1950, while in New York, *Maugham bought two Picassos: a large portrait of a standing woman and The Death of a Harlequin (1915), painted after the death of Picasso’s love, Eva (Marcelle Humbert). The piece depicts the harlequin lying on a bed with folded hands and being mourned by two other figures. Picasso tried to purchase those pieces from Maugham, but the owner refused to sell. On 10 April 1962, when Maugham auctioned his art collection at Sotheby’s, London, the Death brought $224,000, reportedly a record price for a work by a living artist. Bibliography: Cordell; Crystal; Morgan; Vinson.
PINKER, JAMES BRAND (1863–1922). Scottish literary agent. Formerly a magazine editor and publisher’s reader, Pinker established himself as a literary
218
PISSARO, CAMILLE JACOB
agent in 1896, renting an office in Arundel Street, the Strand, London. His clients referred to him as ‘‘Jy Bee,’’ and he, in turn, acted with extreme paternalism toward them, even going so far as to advance money when they needed some form of subsistence. *H. G. Wells (1866–1946) became one of Pinker’s earliest clients, followed by *Henry James (1843–1916), *Arnold Bennett (1867–1931; to whom Pinker advanced fifty pounds per month when he went to Paris to write and from whom, in turn, the agent received a total of 2,600 letters during their association), the American Stephen Crane (1871–1900), Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939), Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), and *Somerset Maugham. Maugham signed on with Pinker in 1905 on the advice of Arnold Bennett, whom he had met in Paris. He dismissed Pinker in 1908, believing that he did not need an agent. However, the two continued their business relationship until Pinker’s death on 10 February 1922. Bibliography: Curtis (1977); Drabble; Morgan.
PISSARO, CAMILLE JACOB (1830–1903). The French impressionist painter, known for his rural scenes. Born at St. Thomas, Danish West Indies, to French and Creole parents, Pissaro attended school in Paris (1841–1847), then worked at his father’s store at St. Thomas. He ran away from home and job, first to Venezuela and then on to Paris in 1855. His art talent and interests developed through his associations with the French painters Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), Edouard Manet (1832–1883), and Claude Monet (1840– 1926). Working initially in the outdoors in and around Pontoise on the Oise River some eighteen miles north-northwest of Paris, but not achieving significant success, he moved to Brittany and then to London (1870–1871). In 1871, Pissaro married Julie Vellay; the painter, designer, wood engraver, and printer Lucien Pissaro (1863–1944) numbered among their seven children. Returning to Pontoise in 1872, Pissaro worked (1879–1881) with Paul Ce´zanne (1839–1906) and then with *Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), showing his work in all eight of the impressionist exhibitions at Paris. His work declined beginning in 1895, when he developed intermittent eye trouble. He died in Paris on 13 November 1903. In June 1945, after having sold the movie rights of his novel *The Razor’s Edge (1944) for $250,000 to Twentieth-Century-Fox, *Maugham went to *Hollywood to rewrite the screenplay. The head of the studio, Darryl Francis Zanuck (1902–1979), wanted to pay Maugham for his efforts, but the writer refused. In exchange, Zanuck offered to purchase for Maugham a painting of his choice at a price not to exceed $15,000. As a result, Maugham bought his first impressionist painting, Pissaro’s scene of the harbor in Rouen. He also owned the artist’s Winter Landscape. Bibliography: Purely for My Pleasure; Crystal; Morgan; Vinson.
‘‘THE POINT OF HONOUR’’
219
‘‘THE POET’’ (1926, 1936). A short story initially published in 1926 and included in the collection *The Cosmopolitans. †Calisto de Santa Ana, a Spanish poet, politician, and the last descendant of the Grand School, lives in seclusion in his native Andalusian town of Ecija. He had led a Byronic existence and had narrated his hazardous life in a series of poems that had brought him fame. Further, he has refused, since the age of thirty-five, to be photographed. †The Narrator goes to visit him and finds that he lives in an air of poverty, but not of squalor. Nonetheless, he waits with bated breath and excitement as the old man descends the stairs; the visitor claims that he is honored to make the acquaintance of so great a poet. ‘‘A flicker of amusement passed through those piercing eyes and a smile for an instant curved the lines of that stern mouth. ‘I am not a poet, Senor, but a bristle merchant. You have made a mistake, Don Calisto lives next door.’ I had come to the wrong house.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
‘‘THE POINT OF HONOUR’’ (1922, 1947). A short story included in the travel collection *On a Chinese Screen (1922) and in the volume of short stories *Creatures of Circumstance (1947). †The Narrator remembers when, as a young man just following the Spanish-American War (April–December 1898), he had gone to Seville, *Spain, to see the celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi. First at a bullfight and later at his residence, the young Narrator meets a man who tells him a story about †Don Pedro Aguria, descended from an admiral of Spain under King Philip II (1527–1598) of Spain and Portugal and also from another who had been a close friend of Philip IV. Don Pedro had estates in Cordova, Aguilar, and Seville. The Narrator also learns about Don Pedro’s wife, †Soledad Aguria, daughter of the †Count of Acaba; she does not love her husband but apparently married him to ease her father’s financial difficulties. At the opera, the Count of Acaba had introduced the Agurias to †Pepe Alvarez, a young artillery officer just returned from Cuba. A childhood friend of Soledad, he had, unknown to Don Pedro, been engaged to her before his departure from Spain. Don Pedro demands that Soledad not see Pepe; if she does, he maintains that he will kill the young man. In Don Pedro’s mind, the situation has nothing to do with love or hate; it stands as an affair of honor. At a ball given by †Conchita de Santaguador, Don Pedro attends without his wife, who refuses to go so she will not have to confront Pepe Alvarez. Don Pedro notices Pepe’s absence and believes that he is carrying on with Soledad. Soledad denies that the young man came to see her, but the damage has been done, through rumor and gossip, to Don Pedro’s reputation. He must challenge Pepe to a duel, or Pepe must resign his commission and leave the country. Don Pedro then openly insults Pepe’s father; the young man slaps him in the face; the next day, Don Pedro kills the young man in a duel. Thus, a code of honor destroys those who uphold it, and the rigidity of vengeance represents the mainstream of the nobleman’s principles.
220
‘‘A POINT OF LAW’’
Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance; On a Chinese Screen.
‘‘A POINT OF LAW’’ (1903). A short story that appeared initially in the London magazine The Strand for October 1903; reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for February 1959. †The Narrator pays a visit to his solicitor, †James Addishaw, senior partner in the London law firm of Addishaw, Jones, and Braham. The lawyer relates the story of †Kate Daubernoon, the only daughter of †Roger and †Mrs. Daubernoon. One of the oldest clients of James Addishaw and a North Country squire with large estates in Westmorland, Roger Daubernoon injures his spine in a hunting accident and for twenty years lingers as a cripple. At age twenty-two, following that accident and then the death of her mother, Kate, a skillful nurse, must care for her invalid father. The years have robbed her of her country freshness and health; at age forty, she has grown prim and old-maidish before her time. Indeed, at her father’s demise, she herself faces a premature death from consumption. Suddenly, Kate tells Addishaw that she plans to marry †Ralph Mason, a tall and handsome land agent’s clerk, some fifteen years younger than Kate. Addishaw offers him an annuity of £2,000 per year if he postpones indefinitely his marriage, but the greedy provincial Lothario turns down the proposal. Against Addishaw’s advice, Kate marries Mason, and they depart for *Italy, where Kate soon dies, intestate. Mason comes to Addishaw’s office with a will, in which Kate leaves everything to Mason. However, the lawyer proves the document to be invalid, since it bears a date prior to their marriage; marriage, according to Addishaw, nullifies previous wills. The only valid will is that of Roger Daubernoon, which leaves all his and Kate’s real property to his brother, †Robert Daubernoon, an officer on half pay and with a large family. For his scheme to get all of Kate’s money and estate, Mason receives the total sum of £43, seven shillings, and threepence halfpenny. Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories; Cordell; Stott (1973).
POINTS OF VIEW (1958). A collection of essays, announced to be *Maugham’s final book, published in November in London by *William Heinemann and in 1959 in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday. Subjects of the pieces include the prose fiction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832); John Tillotson (1630–1694), archbishop of Canterbury; masters of plain English prose; an Indian holy man (‘‘The Saint’’); the journals of the de Goncourt brothers, Edmond (1822–1896) and Jules (1830–1870); Jules Renard (1864– 1910) and Paul Leautaud (1872–1956); ‘‘The Short Story’’ (Chekhov, *Maupassant, Katherine Mansfield, *Henry James, Edgar Alan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne). In each essay, Maugham blended biographical detail with personal experiences and critical pronouncements. Bibliography: Cordell; Curtis (1974); Morgan.
PORTRAITS OF MAUGHAM
221
‘‘THE POOL’’ (1921). A short story included in the collection *The Trembling of a Leaf. *Maugham based the piece on an actual incident of the English manager of the Apia Bank, *Samoa, who had met a beautiful sixteen-year-old Samoan girl at a rock pool and fell in love with her. In the story, his original model becomes a Scot, †Bertie Lawson, a young but unattractive district bank officer. Against all advice, he marries the girl, the sixteen-year-old half-caste †Ethel, daughter of old †Brevald—a Norwegian blacksmith, trader, and planter who had four native wives and more children than he could count. However, problems develop because, not understanding her native culture and customs, he treats her as a white woman. Ethel bears Lawson a son, †Andrew, and he takes them back to Kincardineshire, *Scotland, with him, which proves fatal. Simply, Ethel cannot endure her new surroundings. She leaves Bertie, but he follows her back to Apia, where they move into old Bredvald’s small and overcrowded bungalow. Ethel retreats more and more into her native habits. After five years of marriage, Lawson becomes jealous, miserable, an object of public scorn, a drunkard; he hates himself and in the end takes his own life. Again, the intentions of the transplanted European may be valid, but in the colonies, good intentions often lead to deterioration and destruction. Bibliography: Collected Short Stories. I. East and West; Trembling of a Leaf; Cordell; Curtis (1974). Morgan.
‘‘THE PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN’’ (1925, 1936). A short story, originally entitled ‘‘The Code of a Gentleman,’’ published initially in 1925 and included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). †The Narrator browses through a secondhand bookstore in Seoul, Korea, and comes across a copy of the Complete Poker Player, an 1879 volume by one †John Blackbridge, an actuary and counselor-at-law. He discovers that in writing the book, the author, an American and a southerner, had painted a complete portrait of himself. The thesis of the book focuses upon the writer’s determination that ‘‘[P]oker is a game for gentlemen.’’ What follows, then, exists as a series of ‘‘Maughamisms’’ on the general subject of life filtered through the metaphor of poker. For example: ‘‘The lower cards as well as the lower classes are only useful in combination or in excess, and cannot be depended upon under any other circumstances.’’ It all ends with the usual Maugham motto: ‘‘For we must take human nature as it is.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans; Curtis (1974).
PORTRAITS OF MAUGHAM. In discussing the most noted portrait of *Maugham, one must begin with the writer’s longtime friend, *Sir Gerald Festus Kelly (1879–1972), who painted Maugham on at least thirty different occasions: his The Jester (1911) belongs to the National Portrait Gallery, another done in 1935 is owned privately, and a 1948 Kelly portrait hangs in King’s School,
222
POSNER, DAVID LOUIS
Canterbury. Jacob Epstein (1880–1952) did a bronze (1951) that resides, by way of the Tate Gallery, in the National Portrait Gallery. A 1931 portrait by Philip Steegman (?–1952) hangs there also. Sir William Rothenstein (1872–1945) completed a drawing of Maugham, a reproduction of which appeared in Contemporaries (1937), while the 1949 portrait by *Graham Vivian Sutherland (1903– 1980), reportedly that painter’s best work, hangs in the Tate Gallery; a reproduction appears in *Glenway Wescott’s edition of The Maugham Reader (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1950). Maugham’s neighbor on the Riviera, the French artist *Marie Laurencin (1885–1956), sketched the writer in her usual romantic style in 1936, while paintings by Edouard MacAvoy, H. A. Freeth, and Vasco Lazzolo reside in private hands. Laurence Tompkins, an American sculptor, completed a bronze bust in 1941, a photograph of which may be found in Angus Wilson’s edition of Cakes and Ale and Twelve Short Stories (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1967). Bibliography: DNB, 1961–1970.
POSNER, DAVID LOUIS (1926?–1985). American poet who wrote verse under the pseudonym of ‘‘Jules Bourchier.’’ His published works include Poems in a Single Key (New York: Faulconer Press, 1943), The Deserted Altar (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1956), The Deserted Altar and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957), A Rake’s Progress (London, 1962), and The Dialogues (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1969). In the spring of 1943, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, New York, the sixty-nineyear-old *Maugham received a letter from the seventeen-year-old Posner, then a high school senior, praising *Of Human Bondage, which he had just read. Maugham invited the young man to visit him and, according to later letters from Posner to biographer Ted Morgan, the two made love. Apparently, their bedroom activities went forward on a weekly basis, and, when Posner gained admission to Harvard, Maugham paid his tuition. In December 1943, Posner visited Maugham at his house on the Nelson Doubleday estate at Yemassee, South Carolina. However, although Maugham gave the young man money, books, and advice on writing, the latter tired of a relationship with a man old enough to be his grandfather. Posner appears to have faded from Maugham’s sight and interest after the middle of 1946. In that year Maugham, when finding out that the American poet was on his way to Paris, asked him to check on the condition of his apartment on the Rue La Fontaine, which he had left in charge of *Gerald Haxton’s friend from the Riviera, *Louis (‘‘Lulu’’) Legrand. Posner reported that Legrand, as a male prostitute, was conducting business from Maugham’s rooms—at which point the writer sold the apartment immediately. Bibliography: Contemporary Authors; Morgan.
‘‘PRINCESS SEPTEMBER’’ (1922). A short story (a fable, actually), published first in the December 1922 issue of Pearson’s Magazine; published as
‘‘PRO PATRIA’’
223
‘‘The Princess and the Nightingale’’ in The Book of the Queen’s Doll House Library (1924), edited by Edward Verrall Lucas (1968–1938); reprinted in *Gentleman in the Parlour (1930). In this mixture of fable with political and social allegory, †Princess September, the ninth daughter of the †King and †Queen of Siam, loses her favorite †Parrot. However, that creature is replaced by another †Bird—presumably a nightingale, but never named as such. At any rate, the Bird appears daily to sing for September. Her jealous sisters suggest that in due time, the Bird will leave her, so she decides to keep him in a golden cage. However, the Bird claims that he cannot sing unless he is free, and if he cannot sing, he will die. She then frees the creature, who returns to sing whenever inclined to do so. Moral: if restrained or confined, the artistic temperament cannot survive. In the end, when she comes of age, September marries the †King of Cambodia; her jealous sisters grow ugly and must marry low-level cabinet ministers. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Gentleman in the Parlour; Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1974); Morgan; Stott (1973).
PRINCESS SEPTEMBER AND THE NIGHTINGALE (1939). A book-length edition of the short story ‘‘Princess September’’ (1922), published in London by Oxford University Press and illustrated, in color, by Richard C. Jones. In April 1924, *Maugham transcribed the 1922 story in his own handwriting and under this title onto the pages of a one-inch-high volume with yellow calf binding as a contribution to the 1,000 volumes in the library of the Queen’s Doll’s House, part of the British Empire Exhibit at Wembley. Built at a cost of 1 million dollars, the Doll’s House, a gift of the British people to their king and queen, represented an updated (1923) version of a home designed by the noted church architect Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723). Bibliography: Benson; Morgan; Stott (1973).
‘‘PRO PATRIA’’ (1903). A short story. Known as a carpetbagger—a political candidate without connection to the place that he wishes to represent—†John Porter-Smith belongs to the Unionist Party. He had fought in the Boer War as a member of the Imperial Yeomanry and for his efforts received a scratch on the hand. Having committed an indiscretion with the governess of his wife’s sister, he has been separated from the ravishing, slender, and delicate †Fanny Porter-Smith for over a year. Porter-Smith’s supporters in his run for the parliamentary seat include the Low Church Party leader, the †Reverend Septimus Cameron. A Roman Catholic represents the rival Radicals. Porter-Smith’s major problem is that Cameron knows of his indiscretion and will withdraw his support unless Fanny appears to deny the story. In company with †Major Long, another supporter, Porter-Smith goes to London, where Fanny is living with her mother, †Mrs. Mahon. Fanny refuses to return to the constituency with her husband to deny the story, but Long appeals to her sense of duty and patriotism. She relents,
224
‘‘THE PROMISE’’
but only on condition that, after the election, Porter-Smith will have no further claim upon her. Fanny convinces Rev. Cameron that the story of her husband’s indiscretion has no merit. After Porter-Smith wins the election, husband and wife reconcile and go off to Paris, vowing never to quarrel again. ‘‘And so far they haven’t; but then the election only took place the other day.’’ Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories.
‘‘THE PROMISE’’ (1925, 1936). A short story published initially in 1925 and included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). The †Narrator, a novelist, arranges to have lunch at Claridge’s with his †Wife, but she fails to arrive. He then sees and joins †Lady Elizabeth Vermont, daughter of the seventh †Duke of St. Erth. First married at age eighteen, her union ended in divorce, followed by a succession of husbands and lovers. Her current husband of ten years, †Peter Vermont, independent and affluent, married Lady Elizabeth when he was age twenty-one and she age forty. When they married, Elizabeth promised Peter that he could have his freedom whenever he wanted it. He eventually falls in love with the fair and fluffy †Barbara Canton. Even though Peter Vermont has not asked Elizabeth to break her promise, she plans to ask him for a divorce, knowing full well that Barbara’s father, the stuffy †Robert Canton, will not allow his daughter to marry Peter. After all, Elizabeth Vermont is a very honest woman. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
‘‘THE PUNCTILIOUSNESS OF DON SEBASTIAN’’ (1898). *Maugham’s first published story, appearing in the October 1898 issue of Cosmopolis, a London and New York trilingual magazine (English, French, Spanish) edited by one F. Ortmans—who, by the way, never paid the writer; included in Maugham’s first collection of short stories, *Orientations (1899). The †Narrator arrives in the Castillian city of Xioromonez, where he receives a personal tour of the cathedral by †Don Sebastian Emanuel De Mantona, the present Duke De Losas, a bachelor close to forty years of age and the last of his line. For thirty-one shillings and threepence, he sells the Narrator the manuscript account of how †Dona Sodina de Berruguete, the first wife of the first †Don Sebastian, had raised her husband to the highest dignities of *Spain. The document unfolds the story of his ancestor, that first Don Sebastian, who had been engaged to Dona Sodina since age ten and had married her at age twentytwo, she being sixteen. Following fifteen years of marriage, Dona Sodina dies from having eaten excessively of pickled shrimps, intended to aid in the fertility process. Don Sebastian then poisons his brother, the †Archbishop Pablo de Mantona, a great favorite of the king and the pope and a pattern of Christian virtue, whom he found had an affair with Dona Sodina. As a tribute to his brother’s memory and to his patron saint, Don Sebastian erects, with Pablo’s money, a chapel to his memory. Don Sebastian then goes to Madrid, where he becomes an adviser to †King Philip and receives the appointment as admiral of the fleet.
PURELY FOR MY PLEASURE
225
Created Duke de Losas, he marries the richest heiress in Spain, amasses wealth and titles, and lives happily. After he finishes reading the manuscript, the Narrator again meets the present Duke de Losas, and he advises the Spaniard to go to the United States before that country places a duty on foreign noblemen. Further, ‘‘I gave him a letter of introduction to an heiress of my acquaintance at Hampstead; for even in these days it is not so bad a thing to be Duchess of Losas, and even the present duke has no brother.’’ Bibliography: Seventeen Lost Stories; Curtis (1974); Morgan; Stott (1973); Tercentenary Handlist.
PURELY FOR MY PLEASURE (1962). *Maugham’s last book, intended to coincide with the auction of Maugham’s paintings at Sotheby’s, London, on 10 April 1962. This volume, published by Doubleday, contains a collection of essays, mostly narratives and anecdotes, that provide an account of the writer’s art collection and the process that he applied to the collection of art. Maugham explains why a writer collects art and outlines his artistic standards. It also includes color reproductions of Maugham’s pictures, the most interesting being those by *Roderic O’Conor and the Maugham portraits by *Marie Lorencin and Edouard MacAvoy. Bibliography: Curtis (1977); Stott (1973).
Q QUARTET (1949). A motion picture version of the short stories *‘‘The Facts of Life’’ (1939), *‘‘The Alien Corn’’ (1931), *‘‘The Kite’’ (1947), and *‘‘The Colonel’s Lady’’ (1946); produced by Joseph Arthur Rank (1888–1972) and starring Basil Redford and Cecil Parker (1897–). QUEEN MARY. On 1 December 1930, after having considered plans for the recovery of nearly a half century of transatlantic leadership and to lure rich Americans to Europe, Cunard Lines awarded a contract for a new luxury liner to the yard of John Brown on the River Clyde near Glasgow, *Scotland. Brown, by the way, had built the ill-fated Lusitania. Although Brown laid the keel within a month and had the frame finished by December 1931, financial difficulties arising from worldwide economic depression forced delays until April 1934. By that time, Cunard had merged with the White Star Line. Finally on 20 September 1934, Queen Mary launched the luxury liner that bore her name. At her launch, the Queen Mary, at 81,237 gross tons, represented the largest ship afloat. She had four sets of single-reduction-geared turbines, each developing 160,000 shaft horsepower and each driving one of the eighteen-foot propellers. At normal speed, the vessel consumed 1,020 tones of fuel every twenty-four hours. Carrying a crew of 1,285 officers and hands, the Queen Mary could accommodate 2,038 passengers: 704 in first class, 751 in second class, and 583 in tourist. Queen Mary sailed on her maiden voyage from Southampton and Cherbourg on 27 May 1936; in August of that year, it achieved a record speed of 30.14 knots westbound and 30.63 knots eastbound, besting the earlier mark of the Normandie. Two years later, the Queen Mary raised the record to 30.99–31.60, figures that held until the new United States bested them in 1952. At the outset of World War II, the Queen Mary remained tied at a pier on the
QUEEN MARY
227
North River, New York City, as protection against the heavy bombing of Britain by the Germans during 1939–1940. From there, in company with the Queen Elizabeth, it sailed to Sydney, Australia, to be refurbished and employed as a troopship to accommodate as many as 15,000 men. Not until July 1947 could the Queen Mary rejoin the Cunard-White Star fleet as a regularly scheduled ocean liner. The end came when, in 1967, the city of Long Beach, California, offered Cunard-White Star £3,400,000 for the ship, and it eventually came to rest at a Long Beach pier. Two of its decks were converted to a Museum of the Sea, staterooms became floating hotel rooms, and ample restaurant facilities were installed. *Maugham sailed aboard the Queen Mary from New York to Cherbourg in March 1939, no doubt in company with his secretary/companion, *Gerald Haxton. After the war, this time with his new secretary/companion, *Alan Searle, Maugham boarded the Queen Mary in December 1948 from Southampton to New York, particularly to call on the dying *Nelson Doubleday and to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday in San Francisco with his longtime friend and financial adviser *Bertram Alanson. Searle and Maugham returned from New York on the same ship on 11 February 1949. Finally, Maugham and Searle spent from 22–27 September 1950 on board the Queen Mary to New York, principally so that the writer might see *Dr. Max Wolf for treatments designed to slow the aging process. One would assume that the two took the same vessel for their return to England in November of the same year. Bibliography: Albion; Morgan.
R ‘‘RAIN’’ (1921) A short story, originally published as ‘‘Miss Thompson’’ in April 1921 in Smart Set, the New York magazine edited by George Jean Nathan (1882–1958) and Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956); included in the collection *The Trembling of a Leaf (1921). A dramatic adaptation written by John B. Colton (1889–1946) and Clemence Randolph opened on Broadway at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on 7 November 1922, starring Jeanne Eagles (1894–1929) and extending through 648 performances over the next eighteen months. Boni and Liveright published this play in 1923, as did Samuel French in 1948. By 1935, there had been no less than sixty stock company performances of Rain. In London, Basil Dean (1888–1978) began rehearsals at the Globe Theatre in mid-March 1925, with Tallulah Bankhead (1902–1968) in the lead role; however, *Maugham rejected her in favor of the Anglo-Norwegian character actress Olga Lindo (1898–?), and the play opened on 12 May 1925, running for 125 performances. In 1923, Colton and Randolph sold Rain to *Hollywood for $150,000, from which Maugham received 25 percent. A silent version, Sadie Thompson, appeared in 1928, starring Gloria Swanson (1899–1983) and Lionel Barrymore (1878–1954). Then in 1932, Joan Crawford (1908–1977) and Walter Huston (1884–1950) filmed the first talking version on Catalina Island, from a script written by the American playwright Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959) and under the direction of Lewis Milestone (1895–1980). The third version, *Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), starred Rita Hayworth (1918–1987) and Jose Ferrar (1912– 1992). A musical version opened on Broadway 16 November 1944 for sixty performances over two months, starring Daniel Cobb, Norman Lawrence, June Havoc (1916–), and James Newell; music by Vernon Duke (1903–1969), book
‘‘RAW MATERIAL’’
229
by Howard Dietz (1896–1983) and Rouben Zachary Mamoulian (1897–1987), directed by Mamoulian. Ethel Merman (1908–1984) refused the role of †Sadie Thompson because she did not like Duke’s songs. Set on the largest island of Western Samoa, the piece evolved directly from notes that Maugham recorded while he, *Gerald Haxton, and a number of passengers on their way from Honolulu to *Tahiti lodged at a hotel in Pago Pago to await, during the hot and wet season, a quarantine inspection. The piece really functions as a conflict between two missionary couples and a prostitute. On one side the reader finds the missionaries, †Reverend Alfred Davidson, silent, sullen, reserved, repressed, and, basically, a narrow-minded religious fanatic; his wife, †Mrs. Davidson, small and with a sheeplike face; a seemingly timid Scot, †Dr. Alec Macphail, and his equally timid wife, †Mrs. Macphail. Unlike Davidson, Macphail does appear endowed with a certain degree of reason. Counter to them all run the coarse spirit and personality of the loose American lady Sadie Thompson—age twenty-seven, blond, plump, and with fat calves. Davidson tries to conquer that spirit and reform the personality by persecuting the prostitute, generally making her life miserable, and trying to shame her to repentance. He eventually convinces the governor to have Sadie deported back to Honolulu. However, he ends by attempting to make love to the prostitute and then slitting his own throat. From that incident, Sadie appears more radiant and selfpossessed than ever, convinced that all men are, essentially, little more than dirty pigs. All of the activities and conflicts within the story go forth against the background of continual rain, which depresses both characters and readers. Thus, critical commentators have been quick to label ‘‘Rain’’ as an early representative of Freudian fiction. Another set of observers has termed the piece a vicious attack by Maugham on the hypocrisy of English missionaries who committed more sins and violations against the faith than those so-called heathens whom they had set out to convert. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Trembling of a Leaf; Brander; Brophy; Burt; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Davies; Halliwell; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Menard (1965, 1967); Morgan; Mortimer; Stott (1973).
‘‘RAW MATERIAL’’ (1923, 1936). A short story published initially in 1923 and included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). The †Narrator, aboard a French liner on his way from Haiphong to the East, meets two gentlemen who seem likely to add to his small store of information. †Campbell, a New Yorker in his late thirties, appears to be a professional gambler but actually reveals himself to be an eminent banker. †Peterson, also from New York and also seemingly a professional gambler, is a distinguished mining engineer. The Narrator observes them drinking and playing small stakes poker in Shanghai and Peking and convinces himself that neither is what he states he is—namely, a banker and an engineer. He then parts company with the pair. In New York, a †Woman invites the Narrator to lunch at the Ritz, indicating
230
THE RAZOR’S EDGE
that two friends will join them. In come Campbell and Peterson, and the Narrator realizes that the former is indeed an opulent banker and the latter a distinguished engineer. He also admits to not being a card shark. ‘‘[A]s I blandly shook hands with them I muttered under my breath furiously: ‘Imposters!’ ’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
THE RAZOR’S EDGE (1943, 1944). A novel, published in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday and Company, and at London by *William Heinemann; reprinted by Penguin Books (1978). Film versions by Twentieth-Century-Fox (1947), starring Gene Tierney (1920–1991), Tyrone Power (1913–1958), Clifton Webb (1891–1966), Anne Baxter (1923–1985), and *Herbert Marshall (1890– 1966), with the film script by *Lamar Trotti (1900–1952). *Maugham received $250,000 from Twentieth-Century Fox for the movie rights; by the end of November 1947, it had already grossed $6,032,781.71. Columbia Pictures remade the novel into a second film in 1984, starring Bill Murray (1950–). A Books on Tape recording appeared in 1977. By 1954, the novel had sold 1,367,283 copies in the United States alone; by 1960, worldwide sales had exceeded 5 million copies. Maugham took the title of the novel from the Kasha-Upanishad (written c.900 B.C.)—one of the 112 final portions of the Veda, the basis of Hindu religion. The Upanishads, which essentially explicate Hindu religion and philosophy, describe the relationship of the Brahman, or universal soul, to the atman, or individual soul. Maugham extracted the statement ‘‘The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.’’ Practically every principal character in the novel, beginning with the American †Lawrence Darrell, underscores that theme. Indeed, the novel exists almost as a collection of short stories involving characters loosely connected to one another and to the Upanishad motto, but each trying to find a path to his or her own salvation. Darrell, his parents’ only son—his mother had died giving birth to him, while his father, a Yale professor of Romance languages (‘‘or something like that’’) had passed away early in Larry’s childhood—had left St. Paul’s School to enlist as an aviator. In 1919, having returned from the war, the handsome Darrell finds himself back in Chicago, engaged to †Isabel Bradley. Larry then leaves for Paris, where the †Narrator—the first occasion upon which Maugham inserts his own name into one of his works—meets him unexpectedly in Paris twelve years later and becomes the sounding board through which the reader learns of his (and other characters’) varied experiences. Darrell had taken a job as a coal miner in Lens, northern †France; from there he moved on to Belgium and †Germany, then to †Father Ensheim’s Benedictine monastery in Alsace, from which he moved on to *Spain, *Italy, the East, *India (for two years), and back to Paris. Throughout this circuitous path to salvation and to the gospel of his new Hindu faith, Larry easily detaches himself from former material, physical, and sexual relationships. Chief among those appears Isabel Bradley, who, at age
THE RAZOR’S EDGE
231
nineteen, conveys to the Narrator the ‘‘absurd notion of a pear, golden and luscious, perfectly ripe and simply asking to be eaten.’’ However, Larry proves unwilling to partake of the fruit, and Isabel marries †Gray Maturin, the son of a millionaire Chicago stockbroker, bears him two children, and, following the death of her mother, †Louisa Bradley, appears to the Narrator as ‘‘chic.’’ The Bradleys, by the way, represent Maugham’s notion of the affluent and worldly post-World War I American family. The grandfather †Bradley had left Virginia in 1939 and settled sixty miles from what would become Chicago. His son, †Myron Bradley, Louisa’s deceased husband and Isobel’s father, had been in the diplomatic service, occupying posts in various parts of the world. His two sons have followed in their father’s career: †Templeton Bradley had gone from a position with the State Department in Washington to a government post in the Philippines, while his (unnamed) elder brother began at Buenos Aires and eventually became charge´ d’affaires in Tokyo. However, Maugham piles the heaviest burdens of materialism upon the willing shoulders of †Elliott Templeton, who really shares with Larry Darrell the role as principal character of the novel. An American, the brother of Louisa Bradley, and in his late fifties (at the outset of the novel), Templeton maintains an apartment in Paris, a suite at Claridge’s when in London, and a house on the Riviera. From an old Virginia family, he has risen by some means to become an ‘‘adviser’’ to wealthy art collectors, which meant that he had made a fortune dealing in works of art. His grandfather had been an Episcopal divine of some eminence; his father had served as a president of a university in the South; his mother traced her son’s descent to one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In 1914, he had served in Flanders and the Argonne with an ambulance corps, and a year later secured a position with the American Red Cross in Paris. A colossal snob who speaks French fluently and correctly, social relationships exist as the ruling passion of Templeton’s life. At some point, Templeton discarded his Episcopalian beliefs and became a zealous Catholic. He managed to obtain the position of a papal chamberlain and received the Order of Merit, and, in return for favors, Pope Pius XII restored to him the old family title of Count de Lauria. In the end, Elliott Templeton dies miserably in the Antibes from a liver ailment. Do not believe that the novel goes forward only on the stereotypical extremes of the pure, enlightened Larry Darrell down one road and the materialistic Templetons, Bradleys, and Maturins upon the other. To the contrary, the novel houses persons who illustrate Maugham’s sometimes cynical notions of the tragedies, discomforts, and compromises of life. For example, Maugham traces the deterioration of †Sophie Macdonald from a modest, freckled, serious-faced, and idealistic fourteen-year-old who loved books and Larry Darrell. At the age of seventeen, seated next to †Maugham at a Louisa Bradley dinner, she appears amusing, thin, and not pretty. Eventually, Sophie marries a lawyer, †Bob Macdonald, and, following the death of her husband and only child in an automobile accident, spends four months in a sanatorium. She takes to drink and sleeping
232
THE RAZOR’S EDGE
with men. Twelve years later, outrageously made up, terribly drunk, and affected by opium, she confronts Larry Darrell, Maugham, and Isabel and Gray Maturin at a cafe´ on the Rue de Lappe, Paris. Larry tries to reform her with a promise of marriage, which might have succeeded had Isabel (who still loves Larry) not interfered. Sophie then runs away to Toulon and takes up residence at the Commerce et la Marine Hotel, where Maugham meets her. Her end comes as no surprise to anyone; her body is found in Toulon harbor, in her underwear, with her throat cut. Two other interesting characters need to be observed. Another ugly woman attracted to and by men, †Suzanne Rouvier, knows both Maugham and Larry Darrell. Before contracting typhoid fever, Suzanne had been mistress to at least six artists in Paris; to one she bore a daughter, †Odette. Suzanne has a brief affair with Larry, then becomes the mistress of †Achille Gauvain, a manufacturer from Lille with a wife and two children. He establishes her with an apartment in Montparnasse and an allowance of 2,000 francs in exchange for her company one night every two weeks. She then takes up painting and, at age forty, appears to have made her peace with life. Particularly, she has been invited (through Gauvin’s intervention) by a Paris art dealer who holds an international reputation, †Meyerheim, to hold an exhibition of her paintings in his gallery. Finally, there appears the shrewd Polish coal miner, †Kosti, whose father supposedly served as a general under the czar. He shares a room with Larry Darrell at the mining village in Lens. Although on the surface ugly and uncouth, Kosti had gone to school in Warsaw, speaks very good French with hardly a trace of a Polish accent, and is really highly educated. A devout Catholic, he had entered the nobleman’s cadet school as a child and had served as a cavalry officer in the recent world war. He claims to have been involved in the recent abortive plot to kill †Josef Klemens Pilsudski (1867–1935), the Polish marshal who became the first president of Poland (1918–1922). He then escaped across the frontier. However, the facts surrounding Kosti bear reservations and qualifications, since persons have claimed that he had been cashiered from the army because he had been caught cheating at cards at the officers’ club in Warsaw. In any event, both Suzanne Rouvier and Kosti emerge as worthy Maugham characters in their own rights, no matter how small or significant their contributions to Larry Darrell’s slide down the razor’s edge of life in search of faith. Interestingly, placed beside the success or the failures of the subordinate characters, Larry Darrell’s so-called end appears rather simple and easily understood. As an unworldly searcher for a life of the spirit and humble selflessness, Larry can easily turn away from all worldly and material temptations. Disposing forever of his yearly income of $3,000, he returns to the United States to become an automobile mechanic or a taxi cab driver. His faith has made him wealthy. The popularity of the piece came about with equal simplicity. Maugham had encouraged his readers, especially affluent young post-World War II Americans, to examine and even question their own postwar values. Of course, given Maugham’s own drive for financial independence and the profits that he derived
RED CROSS
233
from both the book and the film, one needs to be careful before placing him in the same ranks with the really serious social and economic reformers of the times. Bibliography: Aldington; Brander; Brophy; Brown (1970); Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Connolly; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Curtis and Whitehead; Epstein; Halliwell; Jonas (1959/ 1972); Loss (1987/1988); Morgan; Naik; Vidal; Viswanath; Whitehead (1987).
‘‘RED’’ (1921). A short story included in the collection *The Trembling of a Leaf. Reportedly *Maugham’s favorite story, he set it in Pago Pago on Western Samoa. The title character, †Red, described as a beautiful young sailor, attracts the attention of an equally beautiful native Samoan girl, †Sally, who falls in love with him. Shortly after Red disappears, virtually kidnapped by the captain of a shorthanded whaling vessel that happened to pass by, Sally delivers their stillborn child. Eventually, she marries another white man, the unattractive Swede named †Neilson. She does not really love him, nor does she ever forget Red. Years later, Red returns—fat, bald, and vulgar; Sally, too, has become old and fat, and thus their meeting completes the picture of physical deterioration. Each fails to recognize the other. The real art of the piece lies in Maugham’s contrasting descriptions between the young and the old, between the beautiful and the ugly, between the paradise of what could have been and the tragedy resulting from the harsh reality of life. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Trembling of a Leaf; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Morgan.
RED CROSS. The Red Cross, an international organization concerned with alleviating suffering and promoting public health, emerged in 1863 at the urging of Jean Henry Dunant (1828–1910), a philanthropist born in Geneva, *Switzerland. Dunant had seen the suffering and carnage of the wounded on the battlefield of Solferino on 20 June 1859, during the war between *France and Piedmont with Austria. Out of the conference of Geneva in 1863 came the Geneva Convention of 1864, which adopted the red cross as a symbol of neutral aid. The majority of Western governments eventually signed such treaties and conventions. Presently, there exist over 100 national Red Cross societies, with two international bodies based in Geneva. During World War I, the care of wounded and sick soldiers of all nations became a principal concern of the Red Cross. When war erupted in 1914, *Maugham had reached age forty; at five feet six inches, he was both too old and too short to enlist—although the height standard had dropped by five inches at the end of October 1914. Learning that the Red Cross would send ambulances to France, Maugham applied as an interpreter. Upon arriving at Ypres, the writer observed that the Red Cross needed ambulance drivers more than interpreters, and so he took a ten-day leave, crossing over to England to learn to drive an ambulance. Upon his return to the battlefield, Maugham found his unit attached
234
‘‘A REHEARSAL’’
to the French army, and they moved about from one place to another transporting the wounded. ‘‘What was so pleasant in the Red Cross,’’ he later wrote to Violet Hunt in September 1915, ‘‘was that you did what you were told and had no responsibility. I suppose just that is the attractiveness of the monastic life. And your work done, you idle for the rest of the day.’’ Part of the idleness allowed Maugham to meet and enjoy the company of his future secretary/companion and lover *Gerald Haxton, whom he met in Flanders. By early February 1915, Maugham and the Red Cross had to part company; *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome was pregnant, and Maugham returned to England. The careful reader recalls that, in *The Razor’s Edge (1944), †Elliott Templeton had joined an ambulance corps in 1914, serving in Flanders and the Argonne. Then he secured a position with the Red Cross. Similarly, Maugham’s friend, *Henry (Chips) Channon, one of the actual models for the Elliott Templeton fictional character, went to Paris in 1917 with the American Red Cross. Bibliography: Belcham and Price; Crystal; Morgan.
‘‘A REHEARSAL’’ (1904). A prose version of *Mademoiselle Zampa, the oneact curtain-raiser to *Maugham’s play *A Man of Honour, presented at the Avenue Theatre, London, 18 February 1904. This version published in The Sketch for 6 December 1905. The lovely premie`re danseuse, †Genevieve Zampa, passionately devoted to the conventions of her art, is engaged to †Lucien Smith, the composer of an avant-garde ballet. The part calls for her to dance with skirt and high heels, rather than traditional costume; she refuses and breaks off their engagement. Lucien tricks her by threatening to give the part to a rival, which, in turn, brings about the reconciliation of the pair. Genevieve’s buffoonish father, †ReneAntoine-Joseph-Marie de Pornichet de la Paule Zampa, adds the noise to an otherwise flat and foolish plot, particularly when he challenges Lucien to a duel when he thinks that the composer has insulted his daughter. Bibliography: Whitehead (1987).
RENOIR, PIERRE AUGUSTE (1841–1919). The French impressionist painter. Born in Limoges, Renoir began his career essentially as a tradesman, painting first on porcelain, then on fans. After becoming acquainted with the works of Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) and Franc¸ois Boucher (1703– 1770), whose subject matter significantly influenced his own, he entered (1862) the Paris studio and art school of the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre (1806–1874), and from 1864 he began to paint in the open air. Beginning in 1872, Renoir obtained a number of commissions for portraits and exhibited his work with the impressionist painters during 1874–1879 and again in 1882. His most important and most controversial picture from this period, the Moulin de la Galette, of sunlight filtering through leaves, dates approximately 1876, and currently hangs in the Louvre. In 1880, Renoir went to *Italy, and for the next three to five
THE ROAD UPHILL
235
years he painted a series of Bathers in a cold and classical style influenced by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) and Raphael (1483–1520). Afterward, he returned to hot reds, orange, and gold to portray nudes in sunlight, a style that he continued to develop. In his later years, Renoir suffered from an arthritic condition that crippled his hands. In February 1949, in New York City and flush with royalties from American sales of his books, *Maugham purchased Renoir’s Bateaux a’ Argenteuil from the Durand-Ruel Gallery for $50,000. According to his usual practice for this period, to avoid French death duties, he purchased the piece in the name of his daughter, by then Lady John Hope (*Liza Maugham). In Paris in December 1949, he purchased (once more in Liza’s name) another Renoir, this one a nude of the painter’s buxom cook. The third purchase of a Renoir, again in New York, came in early November 1950, when he obtained Trois Jeunes Filles for $29,000, as well as having to pay a French duty charge of $2,000 (which angered him greatly). When Maugham auctioned his paintings at Sotheby’s, London, on 10 April 1962, the Renoir yielded a price of $134,000. Bibliography: Crystal; Morgan; Vinson.
THE RIGHT TO LIVE (1935). A motion picture based on the play *The Sacred Flame (1929); produced by Warner Brothers. THE ROAD UPHILL (1924). A three-act play, never published or produced, that serves as the basis of what will come later in the novel *The Razor’s Edge (1944). Set in post–World War I Chicago, the piece begins by describing a small group of well-to-do, fashionable, and successful socialites who represent charming people and demonstrate perfectly the drives motivating the majority of men and women throughout the world of 1919. They see the future of America in the development of its economic possibilities, with Chicago destined to become the real economic capital of the nation. However, certain of them, in the true †Lawrence Darrell mold, question those values and priorities. †Mrs. Cornelius Sheridan has two sons, †Joseph and †Ford Sheridan, who have returned from the war and simply cannot settle themselves into the routine of the times. Ford sets off to write a play, while Joe does nothing but reaffirm his engagement to †Ruth Latimer, who has committed herself to the care of an invalid mother. Later, Ford abandons his project and succumbs to the temptations of the bonds business. †Broderick Madden, Mrs. Sheridan’s brother, visits Chicago from his permanent Louis XV apartment in Paris, where he pursues his interests in clothes and dogs. For a more promising American counterpart of Madden and a rival for Joe Ford, Maugham ushers onto the stage †Howard Green, a successful businessman and potential millionaire who eventually will marry Ruth Latimer. Ruth, in turn, will bear him a son. In time, the scene shifts to Paris, where Joe determines to give himself two years to learn to paint. Perhaps salvation can be achieved by substituting art for
236
ROBERTS, CECIL EDRIC MORNINGTON
Chicago values. What happens, however, when Joe learns that he will be nothing more than a gifted amateur? Since products prove meaningless in a system of real and honest values, he simply destroys the paintings and sets out to seek unknown lands of the soul. Some degree of salvation can be attained by writing a book. When Joe finally returns to the United States, his book has been published; indeed, a Chicago university professor has acclaimed it to be a truly revolutionary work. Joe discovers that Ruth has married Howard Green and that they have a child. He also learns that she still loves him. Misfortune enters the scene when Howard faces financial ruin and a prison sentence from speculating with other people’s money. He immediately goes off in his private plane and takes his own life—the note upon which the play ends. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b).
ROBERTS, CECIL EDRIC MORNINGTON (1892–1976). British literary editor, poet, novelist, and miscellaneous prose writer. Born in Nottingham, England, the son of John Godber Roberts and his wife, Elizabeth, Roberts attended Mundella Grammar School and University College, Nottingham. His varied career included the literary editorship of the Liverpool Post (1915–1918), official war correspondent with the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy (1916–1918), examining officer to the Civil Liabilities Commission (1919), editor of the Nottingham Journal (1920–1925), and member of the British Mission to the United States (1939–1945). Roberts stood, unsuccessfully in 1922, for Parliament for Nottingham East Division; between 1920 and 1938, he participated in six separate lecture tours to the United States and Canada. In 1927, he received an honorary doctorate from Washington and Jefferson College, Washington, Pennsylvania. He died on 24 December 1976. For more that sixty years, beginning in 1912 and concluding but two years before his death, Roberts published, in total, in excess of 100 volumes of poetry, fiction, biography, travel narrative, and essays. His fiction alone has been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Romanian, and Russian. Indeed, Roberts serves as ample proof that quantity alone cannot find one a place onto the pages of literary history—or, for that matter, into its appendixes. Exactly when Roberts and *Maugham first met remains uncertain, but the former did come to the *Villa Mauresque for lunch on 1 January 1931, finding his host looking grim and acting abruptly. Almost a year later, after attending the opening of Maugham’s antiwar play For Services Rendered, Roberts denounced the piece on the editorial page of the Daily Express as overt slander against the British army and accused the writer of blatant and notorious pacifism. Maugham did not respond. The two writers met again in Munich in late July 1937 and in New York in late 1940, where Roberts did propaganda work for the British government. Then in November 1944, following the New York funeral of Maugham’s longtime companion *Gerald Haxton, Roberts called upon
ROSARITO
237
him to express his condolences, for which the bereaved Maugham proved most grateful. Finally, after Maugham had received the Companion of Honour from Queen Elizabeth II in June 1954, Roberts came to lunch and presented his host with a copy of his latest novel, The Remarkable Young Man (London: Macmillan, 1954); the two discussed writing and compared notes on the length of a writer’s working day—Maugham’s four hours as opposed to Roberts’ twelve. Bibliography: Contemporary Authors, Permanent Series; Morgan.
‘‘THE ROMANTIC YOUNG LADY’’ (1947). A short story included in the collection *Creatures of Circumstance. The †Narrator, in Seville, *Spain, meets a woman from his past. In the forty years since they had last danced at the †Countess de Marbella’s parties, †Pilar Carreon has become the Marquesa de San Esteban, a widow, whose husband formerly served in the diplomatic corps. She causes him to recall the Countess de Marbella, a French woman married to a Spaniard, who had enthusiastically adopted the manners and customs of her husband’s country. Her rival, the widowed †Duchess de Dos Palos, had been married at age fifteen; because of birth and social consequences, she claimed as her right the first place in society, a position that the Countess had won by grace, wit, and character. Thus, *Maugham lays the background for Dona Pilar Carreon, the Duchess de Dos Palos’ beautiful daughter, whom the Narrator had met when she was twenty years of age. Her mother presses her to marry one of the numerous men who had asked for her hand, but the young woman refuses. She has her eyes and heart set upon †Jose Leon, the coachman of the Countess de Marbella and the handsomest man in Seville. Faced with a definite offer from the †Marques de San Esteban, Dona Pilar still refuses to marry anyone other than the coachman. In despair, her mother seeks intervention first from the †Archbishop, who accomplishes nothing, and then from her rival and Jose Leon’s employer, the Countess de Marbella. The Countess confronts Jose and tells him that if he marries Dona Pilar, he must leave her service. Thus, the young man must choose between the lovely young woman and his position—which includes driving the finest pair of mules in all of Spain. Maugham does not surprise us: Jose Leon chooses the mules, and Pilar Carreon becomes, a year later, the Marquesa de San Esteban. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance.
ROSARITO (fl. 1897–1907). From early December 1897 until April 1899, between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-five, *Maugham toured *Spain. While in Seville, he fell pleasantly in love and/or became faintly enamored with a girl named Rosarito. ‘‘[N]ot slow to see my own absurdity, I was conscious that I had been made a pretty fool of,’’ he would remark initially in *The Land
238
ROUAULT, GEORGES HENRI
of the Blessed Virgin (1905) and again later in *Don Fernando (1935), two of his books of travel sketches. Bibliography: Don Fernando; Morgan.
ROUAULT, GEORGES HENRI (1871–1958). French painter and engraver. Born in Paris, Rouault became apprenticed in 1885 to a stained glass engraver. From the beginning and then throughout all of his work, he retained a characteristic of glowing colors outlined with black, principally to achieve a concise statement of his reactions to the clowns, prostitutes, and biblical characters whom he chose for his subjects. He studied under Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), and in 1898 he received the appointment as curator of the Moreau Museum. In about 1904, Rouault joined *Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Andre Derain (1880– 1954), Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958), and Raoul Dufy (1877–1953), known as the Fauves (Wild Beasts), and in 1910, he held his first one-man show. In February 1949, while in New York, *Maugham purchased Rouault’s Crucifixion from the Durand-Ruel Gallery for $10,000 and, to avoid French death duties, placed the piece in the name of his daughter, Lady John Hope (*Liza Maugham). Bibliography: Crystal; Morgan; Vinson.
‘‘THE ROUND DOZEN’’ (1924). A short story, initially published in 1924 and included in the collection Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (1931). The †Narrator, a writer, arrives at Elsom to regain his strength after an attack of influenza. There he comes in contact with †Mortimer Ellis, a shabby little man who could have been anywhere from thirty-five to sixty years of age and who happens to be a famous bigamist. He has married eleven times and sets his sights on a twelfth in the person of †Eleanor Porchester. Between fiftyone and fifty-four years of age, Eleanor, the niece of a tea merchant, †Edwin St. Clair, and his wife, †Gertrude St. Clair, is a spinster who has not lost all of her physical attractiveness. In addition, she has £3,000 per year. Ellis had almost married, as Wife #12, a †Miss Hubbard, who possessed £2,000 in war loans, but he had been discovered and was arrested on the day before the wedding. Through Ellis, *Maugham spouts a rather simple thesis: ‘‘Women have got a craving to be married. It doesn’t matter how young they are or how old they are, if they’re short or tall, dark or fair, they’ve all got one thing in common: they want to be married.’’ He confesses his lack of physical beauty, but ‘‘if I had one leg and a hump on my back I could find any number of women who’d jump at the chance of marrying me. It’s not the man they care about, it’s marriage.’’ Naturally, Ellis succeeds in completing the round dozen, and in the end Eleanor Porchester runs off with him. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; First Person Singular; Curtis (1974).
ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE
239
ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS. Founded under the patronage of George III (1738–[1760] 1820) in 1768, the Royal Academy of Arts functioned primarily for the annual exhibition of works of contemporary artists and for the establishment of a school of art. The first exhibitions were held in a house in Pall Mall, with the first pupils receiving instruction in Somerset House, London, which also housed the library. The academy then took rooms in the Strand, moved to Trafalgar Square in 1837, and then shared space in the National Gallery. Finally, in 1869, the academy moved to Burlington House, Piccadilly. The artist/philosopher Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) served as its first president. *Maugham’s longtime friend the portrait painter *Sir Gerald Festus Kelly (1879–1972) had gained election as an associate of the Royal Academy in 1922, rising to full membership in 1930. In December 1949, at age seventy, Kelly became the president of the Royal Academy of Arts, serving until mandatory retirement in 1955. In March 1951, Kelly invited Maugham to speak at the academy dinner, a formal occasion broadcast nationally by the BBC. The other speakers included Prime Minister Clement Richard Atlee (1883–1967), *Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874–1965), and the statesman and philosopher Lord Herbert Louis Samuel (1870–1963). Then, in February 1954, Kelly again invited Maugham to the annual academy dinner at Burlington House, attended by Elizabeth II and Philip, duke of Edinburgh. Maugham sat next to the queen because Kelly wanted her to have an interesting dinner partner. Bibliography: Crystal; DNB, 1971–1980; Morgan; Weinreb and Hibbert.
ROYAL LITERARY FUND. Established in 1790 at the insistence of the Reverend David Williams (1738–1816), a Dissenting minister who had, in 1776, opened a chapel in Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, London. Williams viewed the fund as a benevolent society to aid authors and their dependents. During 1805–1818, it occupied offices at the Hotel des Etrangers at No. 37 Gerrard Street, London; it currently functions at 144 Temple Chambers, Temple Avenue, London. Originally known as the Literary Fund Society, the organization received a royal charter in 1818 and, in 1845, gained permission to add the word ‘‘Royal’’ to its title. Noted literati who have benefited from the fund include Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Thomas Love Peacock (1785– 1866), James Hogg (1770–1835), John Clare (1793–1864), *D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), James Joyce (1882–1941), and Dylan Thomas (1914–1953). The fund receives no subsidy from the British government and thus depends upon gifts, subscriptions, legacies, and authors’ royalties. *Maugham’s will stipulated that all of his royalties would go to his secretary/ companion *Alan Searle. Upon Searle’s death, the receipts would revert to the Royal Literary Fund. Bibliography: Allibone; Crystal; Drabble; Morgan; Weinreb and Hibbert.
ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE. Founded in 1823 at the suggestion of Thomas Burgess (1756–1837), bishop of St. David’s, and under the patronage
240
RUMSEY, JOHN W
of King George IV (1762–[1820] 1830). The king assigned the sum of 11,000 guineas to be applied in pensions of 100 guineas to each of ten Royal associates and a premium of 100 guineas awarded for a prize dissertation. The council of the society elected the associates, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) being most prominent among the original ten. The society published its Transactions and a limited number of individual tracts. In May 1960, the Royal Society of Literature created a new award, the Companion of Literature, and *Maugham became one of the first five to receive the honor. The others included George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1972), *E. M. Forster (1879–1970), *Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874–1965), and John Masefield (1878–1967). Previously, Maugham had addressed meetings of the society. Bibliography: Allibone; Crystal; Morgan; Weinreb and Hibbert.
RUMSEY, JOHN W. (?–1960). *Maugham’s American theatrical agent who represented the American Play Company (the agency ultimately absorbed by Samuel French). Maugham had been dealing with Rumsey at least as early as 1919, the year in which his play *Caesar’s Wife ran on Broadway for 247 performances. In 1924, Maugham corresponded with Rumsey from *Mexico concerning the potential casting for the American production of his dramatic version of his short story *‘‘The Letter’’ (1926), which would open in London and New York in 1927. In 1934, Rumsey sold the movie rights for two of Maugham’s plays, *The Sacred Flame (1928) and *East of Suez (1922). The agent died in New York on 18 October 1960. Bibliography: Morgan.
S SACHER-MASOCH, LEOPOLD VON (1836–1895). Austrian lawyer and writer, born at Lemberg. His short stories and novels include Der Don Juan von Kolomea (1866), depicting Jewish life in a small Polish town, Das Vermachtnis Kains (1870–1877), and Die Messalinen Wiens (1874). The term ‘‘masochism’’ derives from the form of eroticism that he describes in his later works. In his *A Writer’s Notebook (1949), *Maugham mentions that he had read parts and portions of Sacher-Masoch’s work, and he interpreted the Austrian writer’s form of masochism as a sexual desire in a man to be subjected to physical and mental ill treatment by the woman he loves. Thus, Sacher-Masoch himself had insisted on his wife’s embarking upon a trip with her lover while he, loosely disguised as a footman and suffering the agonies of jealousy, performed menial services for them. In *Of Human Bondage, (1915), for example, †Mildred Rogers, the waitress turned prostitute, humiliates †Philip Carey and causes him untold suffering; yet, he cannot seem to break away from her. On one instance, when his friend †Harry Griffiths falls in love with Mildred and goes off on a trip with her, Philip offers to finance the activity and in a way becomes a part of it. Bibliography: Writer’s Notebook; Crystal; Morgan.
THE SACRED FLAME. A PLAY IN THREE ACTS (1928). The first of the ‘‘final four’’ of *Maugham’s plays, produced in New York at Henry Miller’s Theatre, 43d Street, on 19 November 1928, where it ran for only twenty-four performances, and then at the Playhouse Theatre, Northumberland Avenue, London, on 8 February 1929, starring Gladys Cooper (1888–1971)—who played her part for eight months before leaving to deliver a child. Published in New
242
THE SACRED FLAME
York by Doubleday and Company (1928) and in London by *William Heinemann; French’s Acting Edition, New York (1948); reprinted by Arno Press in 1977. Warner Studios produced a film version in 1929. Maugham took the title of this play from the opening lines of ‘‘Love’’ (1799) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed this sacred flame. (ll.1–4)
The general theme of euthanasia, with its origins in Indian philosophy, proved a delicate, but not altogether shocking, topic for its day. Its insinuations that the permanent incapacity of a son and husband can justify homicide and adultery place the piece somewhere between melodrama and tragedy. Maugham weaves his plot through and around one family. †Maurice Tabret, an aviator who emerged from the war unscathed, appears hearty and cheerful enough. However, while testing a new plane, he crashed, broke the lower part of his spine, suffered severe burns, and, for the past six years, has been confined to his bed. His wife, †Stella Tabret, still beautiful at age twenty-eight, although seemingly devoted to Maurice and reconciled to his condition, has fallen in love with Maurice’s brother, †Colin Tabret. The tall, dark, and handsome Colin, in his early thirties, had, just prior to Maurice’s accident, returned from Guatemala, where he had done well in the coffee plantation business. To complicate matters, Colin is the father of Stella’s yet unborn child. The theme extends its direction through Maurice’s widowed mother, †Mrs. Millie Tabret, whose husband had been in the India Secret Service. Therefore, she has been exposed to the ways of the East, and her love for her invalid son transcends any principles espoused by the Christian faith. That she will become the immediate instrument of Maurice’s demise (although Maugham never actually says so) may be found in her confession: ‘‘What I vaguely divined was too stupendous to fit into the limits of any creed of men.’’ More important, she also believes that the soul of one son will be transported into the mind and heart of the child of another son. The child of Stella and Colin will be the rebirth of Maurice. In conflict with Millie Tabret’s seemingly anti-Christian philosophy stands †Beatrice Wayland, Maurice’s handsome twenty-seven-year-old nurse. Quite naturally, she has fallen in love with the patient whom she has tended for the past five years. She also holds to the belief that Maurice was murdered and suspects a conspiracy between Millie Tabret and Maurice’s physician, †Dr. Harvester. In the third act, Beatrice unsuccessfully attempts to counter Mrs. Tabret’s unconventional philosophy by elevating the simple love of one human being for another to something higher. ‘‘My love for that poor boy [Maurice] was as pure and as spiritual as my love for God. There was never a shadow of self in it.
SAMOA
243
My love was compassion and Christian charity. I never asked anything but to be allowed to serve and tend him.’’ However, she loses the argument, which caused Maugham’s play to be damned from the pulpits of London churches. Bibliography: Collected Plays. III.; Brander; Burt; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Hartnoll; Jonas (1959/1972); Loss (1987/1988); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan; Naik; Ward.
‘‘SALVATORE’’ (1925). A short story, written in 1924, published initially in 1925, and included in the collections *Cosmopolitans (1936) and Here and There (1948). †Salvatore, a pleasant and carefree fellow and the eldest of three sons, becomes engaged to a pretty †Girl from the Grande Marina. However, before they can marry, he must fulfill his military service. As a member of the king’s navy, Salvatore contracts a form of rheumatism that renders him unfit for further duty. He returns to his home, where the Girl he had left behind rejects him because of his ailment. He then becomes a fisherman and a worker in the vineyard of his †Father, and marries †Assunta, an extremely ugly young woman and slightly older than he. They have two boys, one age three and the other almost two years of age. The †Narrator tells us that the only purpose of this story is to hold our attention ‘‘for a few pages while I draw for you a portrait of a man, just an ordinary fisherman who possessed nothing in the world except a quality which is the rarest, most precious and the loveliest that anyone can have. . . . And in case you have not guessed what the quality was, I will tell you. Goodness, just goodness.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans; Here and There.
SAMOA. An island group of the southern Pacific Ocean, east-northeast of Fiji and approximately 2,300 miles southwest of *Hawaii. Politically, it exists as two entities: the independent nation of Western Samoa and American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the United States. In 1722, the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen sailed through the Manua Island group (Ofu, Olosega, and Tau) but did not land. Then, in 1768, the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811) came upon the islands and named the group the Navigators’ Island. Further European travels did not result in significant settlement until 1830, when John Williams (1896–1839), the martyr of Erromango, landed on Savaii to establish a mission for the London Missionary Society. In 1839, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes (1798–1877) led a survey of the area for the U.S. Exploring Expedition, while in 1872, Commander Richard W. Meade, aboard the USS Narragansett, negotiated with High Chief Mauga for the establishment of a coal station at Pago Pago. Britain, *Germany, and the United States entered, in 1889, into an agreement providing for a neutral state of Samoa, but the Samoans could not maintain an effective government. The Convention of 1899 led to the withdrawal of Britain, leaving the western islands to Germany and
244
SAMOA
the eastern half to the United States. New Zealand administered Western Samoa as a League of Nations mandate following World War I and then again under United Nations trusteeship after World War II. In 1962, Western Samoa became an independent state. The Scottish poet and novelist *Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850–1894), ill with tuberculosis, settled in Samoa in 1889 with his wife, Fannie Vandegrift Osbourne (1840–1914), and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne (1868–1947), who would become the American vice-consul on Samoa. On his estate known as Vailima, Stevenson temporarily regained his health, wrote the highly popular letters (to be called ‘‘the Vailima letters’’; published 1895) to his friend Sir Sidney Colvin (1845–1927) in England, and became known to the natives as Tusitala, ‘‘the Storyteller.’’ He died there in 1894 from a brain hemorrhage while working on his unfinished novel, Weir of Hermiston (1896). Early in December 1916, in the midst of a Pacific tour, *Maugham and his secretary/companion, *Gerald Haxton decided to visit American Samoa on their way from *Hawaii to *Tahiti. This would be the writer’s only visit to the islands, but in terms of his craft, it proved significantly productive. On 4 December, they boarded the steamer Sonoma, bound eventually for Sidney, Australia, and stopped at Pago Pago, the capital of Eastern (American) Samoa and the site of Rainmaker Mountain. According to the passenger list published in the Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser for Tuesday, 5 December 1916, other than Maugham and Haxton, the passengers included a ‘‘Miss Thompson,’’ on her way to Apia, Western Samoa, for a job as a barmaid. She would emerge as †Sadie Thompson in *‘‘Rain’’ (1921; originally published as ‘‘Miss Thompson’’). Also on board were a medical missionary and his wife (Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Mulqueen); they, too, would serve as models for characters in the same story. Delayed at Pago Pago because of a quarantine inspection, a number of the Sonoma passengers—including Maugham, Haxton, and Miss Thompson—took lodgings at a boardinghouse on Broad Street. The irritating tone in the story came out of Maugham’s own discomfort from a missing pair of gold cuff links and silver hairbrush, a fungus rash, and the noise generated from the bedroom activities of Miss Thompson and her Samoan lover. Further, during this venture Maugham met a beachcomber, a young American sailor who had been discharged from the service at Pago Pago. He would turn up as the title character in another short story, *‘‘Red’’ (1921). After Pago Pago, Maugham and Gerald Haxton went on to Apia, the capital of Western Samoa on the island of Upolu. Their ship, a battered schooner named the Manua, housed cockroaches and reeked of kerosene. The American captain had lost his certificate, much like †Captain Tom Nichols in the 1932 novel *The Narrow Corner. Maugham found Apia more attractive than Pago Pago. He and Haxton lodged at the Central Hotel and managed to meet the New Zealand administrator, who would appear as the overly formal and conventional †Walker in the short story *‘‘Mackintosh’’ (1921), a piece set on Savaii. The fourth story of the Samoan group, *‘‘The Pool’’ (1921), concerns the English manager of
SARA
245
the Apian bank, whom Maugham transformed into a besotted Scot named †Bertie Lawson. After a visit to Robert Louis Stevenson’s grave, Maugham and Haxton departed Samoa for Wellington, New Zealand. Bibliography: DNB; Drabble; Menard; Morgan; Webster’s.
‘‘THE SANATORIUM’’ (1938). A short story initially published in 1938 and included in the short story collections *Creatures of Circumstance (1947), Here and There (1948), and *Trio (1950). *‘‘The Verger’’ (1929, 1936), *‘‘Mr. Know-All’’ (1925), and ‘‘The Sanatorium’’ made up the three stories for the film Trio, released by Paramount Studios in October 1951, starring Jean Simmons (1929–) and Michael Rennie (1909–1971). The piece owes its origin to *Maugham’s own experiences at a tuberculosis sanatorium in *Scotland in 1919. †Ashenden, a patient at the sanatorium, relates the story of †Major George Templeton, a patient at the sanatorium for the past three or four months who had to resign his commission in the Grenadier Guards after the war. Ill and dying, Templeton nonetheless loves †Ivy Bishop, a pretty twenty-nine-year-old Englishwoman; she has been in and out of the sanatorium for two years but has been in other such institutions for the past eight years. Templeton and Ivy Bishop determine to marry, even though they realize that such an act will shorten their already delicate lives. Ashenden also introduces us to a corps of characters with loose connections with that theme. †Mr. McLeod, whose brother and two sisters have families and do not want to care for him, and the brusque, touchy, and bad-tempered †Mr. Campbell; both have been in the sanatorium longer than anyone else, and both despise each other. †Henry Chester, married with two children and born and bred to live an average life, receives one- or two-day visits from his wife every month, while †Miss Atkin, a middle-aged spinster essentially cured of her tuberculosis, holds the position of honorary librarian. The chief physician and manager of the sanatorium, †Dr. Lennox, touches all of their lives. A genial Scot, he also proves an excellent businessman and an enthusiastic fisherman. Maugham, through Ashenden, summarizes the story, not at the end but in the middle: ‘‘There are people who say that suffering ennobles. It is not true. As a general rule it makes man petty, querulous and selfish; but here in this sanatorium there was not much suffering.’’ In his view, death functions as ‘‘a sardonic theme song that runs through a sprightly operetta.’’ With that out of the way, he weaves the piece to its conclusion and even serves as the best man at the wedding of George Templeton and Ivy Bishop. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance; Here and There; Trio; Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Morgan.
SARA. In September 1936, principally to keep his secretary/companion, *Gerald Haxton, out of Riviera bars and casinos, *Maugham purchased a forty-five-ton fishing boat, the Sara, with two masts and a diesel auxiliary engine and requiring
246
SASSOON, SIEGFRIED LOUVAINE
a crew of three. The writer considered the vessel a ‘‘yacht,’’ and it functioned as another source of diversion for visitors to the *Villa Mauresque. When Maugham prepared to vacate the Mauresque in early June 1940 and go to London, he left Haxton behind to sell the Sara. By July 1943, the Germans had confiscated the boat, and it became a casuality of war. Bibliography: Jonas (1956); Morgan; Robin Maugham (1978).
SASSOON, SIEGFRIED LOUVAINE (1886–1967). English poet and novelist, born at Brenchley, Kent. Educated at Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge, Sassoon began to write poetry early, having been especially encouraged by his mother to do so. After seeing service in World War I, he came to despise armed conflict, even to the point of throwing away his Military Cross medal in disgust. Sassoon gave vent to his pacifism in Old Huntsman (1917), Counterattack (1918), and Satirical Poems (1926). He wrote a number of autobiographical pieces, including Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), Sherston’s Progress (1936), The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942), and Siegfried’s Journey (1945). Sassoon’s later poetry, such collections as Vigils (1935) and Sequences (1956), became increasingly devotional, and in 1957, he converted to Roman Catholicism. In October 1938 in London after session at the clinic of *Dr. Paul Niehans at Clarens, *Switzerland, *Maugham visited Sassoon and his wife at their house in Heytesbury, Wiltshire, where he first met the American playwright *S. N. Behrman. That meeting appears to have been the most significant event in the Maugham–Sassoon relationship. Bibliography: DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
SCHIFFBRUCHIG (1902). See under MARRIAGES ARE MADE IN HEAVEN. SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (1788–1860). Born at Gdansk, Poland, the philosopher Schopenhauer studied at Go¨ttingen and Berlin, then taught at Berlin in 1820. There, he boldly held his lectures at the same hours as those delivered by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), whose ideas he rejected. However, he failed to attract students. Schopenhauer then lived in retirement at Frankfurt, devoting himself to scholarship. His principal work, Die West als Wille und Vorstellung (1819; The World as Will and Idea) emphasized the central role of human will as the creative, primary factor in human understanding. He viewed the will as a blind, irrational force that, in turn, led him to a rejection of eighteenth-century Enlightenment doctrines and to pessimism. Eventually, Schopenhauer attracted critical attention with a collection of diverse essays and aphoristic writings, published in 1851 under the title of Parerga und Paralipomena. Subsequently, he exercised influence over such philosophical movements as existentialism and over such writers as Wilhelm Richard Wagner
SEARLE, ALAN
247
(1813–1883), Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910), Marcel Proust (1871–1922), and Thomas Mann (1875–1955). During the eighteen months that young *Maugham spent in Heidelberg, *Germany (1890–1892), he attended lectures at the university by Ernst Kuno Berthold Fischer (1824–1907), the noted scholar and authority on Schopenhauer who had been lecturing at Heidelberg since 1872. Thus motivated, the impressionable Maugham began to read Schopenhauer and became essentially a lifelong convert to the philosopher’s pessimism. Young Maugham absorbed into his own experiences the notion of a universe whose reason for being remained unknown. Thus, human beings stand as victims of their own instincts, free will represents a mirage, and afterlife serves only as an illusion to help bear the pains of existence. In the end, only exceptional beings, particularly artists, could, through their work, free themselves from the human condition. Bibliography: Crystal; Morgan.
SCOTLAND. During the two and one-half months (August–October 1917) that *Maugham spent in Petrograd, Russia, as an agent for British Intelligence, he caught a touch of tuberculosis, and a lung specialist recommended a stay in a sanatorium. Thus, in November 1917, he booked himself into one such institution at Banchory, Scotland, some twenty miles from Aberdeen. There he remained until spring 1918, recuperating, taking notes for a short story, *‘‘Sanatorium’’ (1938), and completing his play *Home and Beauty (1919). Returning to Banchory in November 1918, Maugham remained until spring 1919, at which point the doctors discharged him with a clean bill of health. SEARLE, ALAN (1904–?). In the spring of 1928, at a London stag dinner hosted by an antique dealer, Robert Tritton, the fifty-four-year-old *Maugham first met the man who would become his third secretary/companion. Searle was then twenty-four. Although little exists about his background, his friends believed him to have been of West Indian origin. Born in the London slum of Bermondsey, the son of a tailor, Searle early had attracted the attentions of older *homosexuals, among them the biographer *Giles Lytton Strachey (1880–1932). He worked for the Discharged Prisoners Aid Society, visiting convicts in prison and then helping them following their release. From that point, Maugham and Searle saw each other whenever the writer came to London, and the latter became a frequent visitor to the *Villa Mauresque. Searle officially assumed his duties as Maugham’s secretary/companion slightly more than a year after *Gerald Haxton’s death (7 November 1944). He had been working at a Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) camp that he had organized in the North Riding of Yorkshire, and Maugham hoped that he might join him after the war. On Christmas Day 1945, he carried the manuscript of *Of Human Bondage (1915) from London to the Doubleday estate in South Carolina; he would remain in his position throughout the rest of
248
SECRET AGENT
Maugham’s life, a devoted, humble, and obedient servant, yet a schemer on behalf of his own self-interests, always fearful that Maugham might throw him out. Simply, he wanted to be certain that when Maugham died, there would be enough money for him to continue the comfortable life. Although Searle took good care of the older Maugham and served to ease tensions between the irascible writer and his friends and family, he also drove an almost irreconcilable wedge between Maugham and his daughter, *Liza, again for the sake of his own survival and self-interest. Certainly, of the three secretary/companions that Maugham had engaged during his long lifetime, Searle proved the most competent scribe, sometimes typing as many as thirty letters per day. However, on more than one occasion, Maugham found himself taking care of his companion rather than the latter tending to the needs of his employer. Searle brought with him a score of physical problems and maladies: jaundice, a scar on the lung, lumbago, liver disease, bleeding piles, psoriasis over his entire body, rheumatism of the spinal cord, kidney stones, and even in one instance a fall that led to broken ribs. However, the strangest action in their relationship came in December 1962, when the aged Maugham erroneously conceived of the notion that his daughter, Liza, wanted to have him certified as incompetent to conduct his affairs and cause him to be committed to an institution. A Nice lawyer advised the writer that if he had another child, Liza could not carry out such action. Maugham then decided to adopt Alan Searle and did so under French law. Liza challenged the adoption, and on 3 July 1963, a French court declared the action void. Following Maugham’s death, Searle sold the contents of the *Villa Mauresque at auction at Sotheby’s, London, in November 1967, realizing $75,000 from the sale. He then moved to a mezzanine flat at 30 Avenue de Grande Bretagne, Monte Carlo. Although Maugham had bequeathed him £50,000, the contents of Villa Mauresque, and his royalties (estimated at $50,000 per year), he continued to suffer from chronic depression, influenza, asthma, bronchitis, and Parkinson’s disease. In 1966, at age sixty-two, he became engaged to Isabelle Darley, the wealthy widow of a military officer from Yorkshire. They planned to marry and settle at Darley Hall, Yorkshire. However, when Searle leaked the news to the British press, Mrs. Darley became so angry that she canceled the engagement. He remained in Monte Carlo, from which place he traveled about the world, retracing the steps that he and Maugham had trod and, generally, making a pest of himself. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990, 1972/1973); Curtis (1977); Morgan.
SECRET AGENT (1936). A motion picture based on the short story collection *Ashenden (1928); produced by Gaumont British. SELDES, GILBERT VIVIAN (1893–1970). American popular writer. After graduating from Harvard in 1914, Seldes went to Europe as a war correspondent.
SELFRIDGE, HARRY GORDON
249
Upon his return, he pursued a career as a journalist and drama critic before serving as editor of The Dial from 1920 to 1923. In addition to writing detective stories under the name of ‘‘Foster Johns,’’ Seldes published The United States and the War (1917) and The Seven Lively Arts (1924), in which he examined comic strips, motion pictures, vaudeville, and popular songs. He surveyed nineteenth-century United States in The Stammering Century (1928), wrote the novel The Wings of the Eagle (1929), and produced The Movies and the Talkies (1929). Then followed an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (1930); The Future of Drinking (1930), demonstrating the effects of Prohibition on drinking habits and manners; Against Revolution (1932); The Years of the Locust (1932), about the depression; Mainland (1936), an analysis of contemporary United States; The Movies Come from America (1937); and The Great Audience (1950), relative to those audiences of films, radio, and television. At some point in the summer of 1949, Seldes wrote to *Maugham and inquired of the writer’s interest in having his short stories adapted to a series of television dramas under the tentative title ‘‘The World of Somerset Maugham.’’ Seldes knew *S. N. Behrman and had expressed such an interest to the American playwright. Interestingly enough, during his tenure as editor of The Dial, Seldes had been most outspoken in his denunciation of such American productions of Maugham’s plays as *The Constant Wife (1926), *Our Betters (1917), and *The Circle (1921). Bibliography: Hart; Morgan.
SELFRIDGE, HARRY GORDON (1856–1947). The American businessman born in Ripon, Wisconsin. Educated privately, Selfridge first worked, at age twelve, as an errand boy in a department store before joining, in 1877, the trading firm of Marshall Field in Chicago, bringing to it new and innovative ideas, as well as significant organizational abilities. By 1892, he had risen to a junior partnership. In 1902, he had purchased his own store in Chicago, but since he did not like competing against his former firm, he sold and left for Europe. While on a visit to London in 1906, he purchased a 42,000-square-foot site on Oxford Street. With the financial backing of Samuel J. Waring of the firm of Waring and Gillow and an agreement that he would not sell furniture, Selfridge built upon it the large department store that bears his name. It opened on 15 March 1909 with 130 departments, a roof garden, a bargain basement that covered three and one-half acres, and a staff numbering 1,800 persons. The store grew out of an original giant Ionic design conceived by Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846–1912) of Chicago, in consultation with Frank Swales. The English architect R. F. Atkinson executed the design, and Sir John Burnet completed the entire project in 1928. Gilbert Bayes designed the clock with an eleven-foot-high figure entitled ‘‘The Queen of Time.’’ Selfridge became a British citizen in 1937. Then, in 1940, because his extravagant lifestyle bordering on dissipation got him into heavy debt, the directors
250
THE SEVENTH SIN
of the department store removed him from control and retired him from the firm on an income of £2,000 per year and the meaningless title of ‘‘president.’’ In 1952, Lewis Investment Trust and Charles Clore of the British Shoe Corporation purchased Selfridge’s. In 1911, when *Maugham first met *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome, Gordon Selfridge functioned as the most prominent among her lovers. As with all of his mistresses, Selfridge gave Syrie a charge account at the store and shopped with her there on Sundays and purchased a house for her in Regent’s Park. She later described the department store owner to Maugham, who found a place for him in his play *Our Betters (1917) as the American tycoon †Arthur Fenwick, an intimate friend of †Lady Pearl Grayston, whom he loves, keeps, and calls ‘‘girlie.’’ Fenwick provides bad food to the working classes in the United States at an exorbitant price. Bibliography: Barnes; Crystal; Morgan; Weinreb and Hibbert.
THE SEVENTH SIN (1957). A motion picture based on the novel *The Painted Veil (1925); produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD (1856–1950). British playwright and essayist. Born in Dublin, the third and youngest child of unhappily married and inattentive parents, Shaw received his early education in the city schools and worked in a Dublin office until 1876, when he moved to London and wrote five mediocre novels. In 1882, he embraced socialism, joined the committee of the Fabian Society, and embarked upon a career as a journalist, writing music and drama criticism and publishing critical essays for the Pall Mall Gazette, the World, and the Star. He then took to writing plays in 1885, his early successes being Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1897), and the Devil’s Disciple (1897). Afterward came Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905), The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), and pieces that demonstrated a wide range of themes and interests. Later plays include the religious pantomime Androcles and the Lion (1912) and the antiromantic comedy Pygmalion (1913). Following World War I, Shaw produced Heartbreak House (1919), Back to Methuselah (1921), and Saint Joan (1923). In all, Shaw wrote over forty plays and continued writing them well into his nineties. Passionately interested in spelling reform, he wrote most of his own work in shorthand and left money in his will for the devising of a new English alphabet based on phonetic principles, which came to be known as ‘‘shavian.’’ In 1935, Shaw received the Nobel Prize for literature. Although *Maugham and Shaw, as playwrights, wrote, produced, and published for the stage within the same general chronological periods, they never had much to do with each other and seldom met. Maugham may have slightly outstripped his older contemporary in terms of popularity and even financial gain, but he has always stood well behind Shaw in terms of literary quality and literary and theatrical longevity. The older Irishman had little or no direct influ-
SHELDON, EDWARD BREWSTER
251
ence upon the younger resident of the Riviera, and even the most interesting among the attempts to compare and/or contrast their work yield little beyond the realization and confirmation that each proved very good at what he attempted. For instance, Anthony Curtis tells us (p. 116) that Maugham understood women much better than any other playwright of this period [post– World War I] whether it was women of the political and social aristocracy, the wives of the professional middle-class or the common prostitute. He understood them much better than Shaw, for example, who merely created new stereotypes of his own by giving women many of the qualities of leadership and resourcefulness traditionally ascribed to men. Shaw devoted a lot of wordage in his polemical plays to the plight of women and led the crusade for their liberation from the domestic prison but it was Maugham who dramatized the actual reality of their situation at the time when they achieved their political and social independence.
Simply, while both playwrights may have asked the same questions, they reached, through their themes, plots, and characters, totally different answers. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974, 1977); DNB; Drabble; Freedley and Reeves; Gassner and Quinn; Hartnoll; Morgan.
SHELDON, EDWARD BREWSTER (1886–1946). American dramatist born in Chicago of wealthy parents. Sheldon became a student at Harvard of the influential George Pierce Baker (1866–1935), whose course in practical playwriting led to the foundation of his ‘‘47 Workshop’’ for the staging of plays written under his tuition. Graduating from Harvard in 1907, Sheldon produced (1908) his Salvation Nell, followed by eight successes within the next six years: The Nigger (1909) concerns a Southern governor who discovers himself to be the grandson of a Negro slave; The Boss (1911); the romantic melodramas The Princess Zim-Zim (1911) and Egypt (1912); and The High Road (1912), a mixture of politics and romance. Sheldon’s most significant piece, Romance (1913), concerns a young clergyman who falls in love with an opera singer. In addition to The Garden of Paradise (1914), a dramatization of ‘‘The Little Mermaid’’ by Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875), Sheldon collaborated with Sidney Coe Howard (1891– 1939) on a romantic fantasy, Bewitched (1924); with Charles MacArthur (1895– 1956) on a realistic melodrama, Lulu Belle (1926), and with Margaret Ayer Barnes (1886–1967) on a murder piece, Dishonored Lady (1930). After 1921, handicapped and then virtually paralyzed by arthritis, he worked only with collaborators, and in 1930, blinded by the disease, he brought his writing career to an end. In 1910, during his first visit to the United States, the thirty-six-year-old *Maugham met and became friendly with the twenty-four-year-old Sheldon, known to his intimates as ‘‘Ned.’’ Maugham visited Sheldon frequently at his New York Gramercy Park apartment, and on weekends the two went together
252
SHEPPEY: A PLAY IN THREE ACTS
to Hampton Roads, Virginia. In Sheldon, Maugham saw the slow, agonizing, and physical destruction of the human being engaged in a fierce struggle with the spiritual will to live. Added to that problem was Sheldon’s disillusionment over a broken engagement to the actress Doris Keane, the leading lady in his play Romance, whom he discovered had been sleeping with the leading man of the piece. Maugham visited Sheldon, who lived under the care of his mother, whenever he came to New York. Reportedly, Sheldon’s high moral advice in 1917 that a man cannot abandon a woman who carries his child led Maugham to the decision to marry *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome. Bibliography: Gassner and Quinn; Freedley and Reeves; Hartnoll; Morgan.
SHEPPEY: A PLAY IN THREE ACTS (1933). *Maugham’s last play, produced at Wyndham’s Theatre, Charing Cross Road, London, on 14 September 1933, directed by John Gielgud (1904–) but running only for eighty-three performances; published in London by *William Heinemann (1933) and in New York by Baker (1949); reprinted by Arno Press (1977). The play actually constitutes a recycling of Maugham’s 1899 short story *‘‘A Bad Example.’’ The title character, †Joseph Miller, known as ‘‘Sheppey’’ because of his birth on the Isle of Sheppey in the north of Kent, has for the past fourteen years worked as a hairdresser at Bradley’s Hairdressing and Barber Saloon, Jermyn Street, London. During the 1920s and 1930s, Jermyn Street, had a reputation for its fashionable men’s shops—shirtmakers, hatters, boot and shoe retailers, and perfumers. Middle-aged, stout, jovial, and sporting (during working hours) a fine head of black wavy hair, Sheppey, a political Conservative, has been married to †Ada Miller for twenty-three years, and, although Sheppey has high blood pressure, both appear to be enjoying life. Then Sheppey wins a residuary prize of £8,500 in the Irish Sweepstakes; after fainting and being revived, he refuses an offer from the proprietor of the saloon, †James Bradley, of a partnership in the business. He then resigns and begins plans to give away all of his money to the poor and needy. In the end, Sheppey dies in his own armchair, in the midst of a vision of death (in the form of a †Woman) and having mercifully escaped the countless problems that his newly found wealth would certainly have brought to him. The play does include a number of interesting but obvious contrasts. Sheppey’s daughter, †Florence Miller, represents modern young woman—pretty, alert, and self-assured. She had been a typist in the city, but when Sheppey wins the lottery, she gives her notice and studies French, in preparation for her honeymoon to Paris. Naturally, Florence Miller stands in total and outspoken opposition to her father giving away his money. Her fiance´, †Ernest Turner, to whom she has been engaged for the past two years, constitutes a sensible match for her. At age twenty-two or twenty-three, the son of a gentleman on the Stock Exchange, he appears alert, vibrant, and charming. A master in one of the County Council schools and a favorite with his pupils, Ernie plans someday to stand for Parliament.
SHIRLEY, CANON F. J.
253
The seeds of Sheppey’s giveaway plan derive their source from †Lord Mereston, one of Sheppey’s wealthy customers at Bradley’s. With a wife and a son, Mereston relays to Sheppey the expenses of life. †Lady Mereston received, for their silver wedding anniversary, a diamond bracelet valued at £2,000, while †Mereston the younger, a Member of Parliament, nurses a constituency that costs his father £1,500 per year. The objects of Sheppey’s grand design take the forms of †Bessie Legros and †Jim Cooper. The latter, a common thief, comes into Sheppey’s life when the barber observes his stealing a doctor’s coat from the owner’s car. Unemployed, hungry, and a product of a half-dozen prison terms, Jim is remanded for a week. However, Sheppey invites him to lodge and board at his house, and Jim repays his host’s kindness by trying to steal everything upon which he can lay a hand. For her part, Bessie Legros, a prostitute, although painted and no longer young, manages to retain some fraction of her former beauty. Sheppey has known her, innocently enough, as one of his drinking companions at the Bunch of Keys pub. When Bessie first arrived in London, she became part of an establishment at Gloucester Place and thus later, at a Kensington flat, plied her wares under the name of ‘‘Mrs. Gloucester.’’ However, following an attack of, and a recovery from, double pneumonia, Bessie found that her gentleman clients could no longer afford luxuries. Sympathizing with her economic decline, Sheppey invites her, too, to lodge and board at his house—an event that does little to amuse Sheppey’s wife and daughter. While moving his characters through the obvious plot direction of this play, Maugham manages to sound another of his familiar chords, the state of the medical profession (and variants thereof)—again a distinct echo from *‘‘A Bad Example.’’ †Dr. Jervis, who tends to Sheppey after he faints upon learning that he has won the Sweepstakes lottery, believes that his patient has had a stroke and advises him to stay in bed. The family brings him back onto the scene when Sheppey reveals his scheme to unload his money. Dr. Jervis perceives a problem with Sheppey’s state of mind and wants to commit his patient to a home. Jervis’s equally inept friend and colleague †Dr. Ennismore, is on the staff of St. Mary’s of Bethlehem Hospital for the insane. One of the greatest authorities in England on diseases of the mind, Ennismore easily ascribes philanthropy to repressed *homosexuality. After examining Sheppey, he reaches the conclusion that he suffers from acute mania, visual hallucinations, and religious paranoia. As with Jervis and Florrie Miller, Ennismore simply underlines the dominant theme of the play: a Christ-like figure, or at least an honest Christian or a plain and simple moral human being, has no real place in post–World War I modern society. Bibliography: Collected Plays. III.; Brander; Brown (1938); Burt; Calder (1972/ 1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Dottin (1937); Hartnoll; Loss (1987/1988); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan; Ward; Weinnreb and Hibbert; Williams (1953).
SHIRLEY, CANON F. J. (fl. 1930–1966). The headmaster of King’s School, Canterbury, from 1935 to 1962 and, by virtue of that position, canon of Canterbury Cathedral. Shirley maintained that, in *Of Human Bondage (1915),
254
SIAM
Maugham fictionalized nothing relative to King’s School but photographed both men and buildings. In terms of their actual relationship, Maugham initially met Shirley in the first week of November 1936, when the writer visited his old school and found it on the verge of bankruptcy. Shirley had written to him, asking for an original play that could function as a benefit performance for the school. Maugham declined the play but sent Shirley a dozen eighteenth-century mezzotints to adorn the masters’ common room. Then followed, in 1937, £200 for tennis courts; still later (1953) came £3,000 for a boathouse and £10,000 for a scholarship for working-class boys. In terms of the last item, Shirley could find no one willing to take advantage of the scholarships and directed the gift toward the building of a physics laboratory. Maugham then (1962) gave Shirley £5,000 for a library atop that structure, to be filled with 1,300 volumes from his own collection, as well as the manuscripts of his first novel, *Liza of Lambeth (1897), and his last one, *Catalina (1948). Maugham returned to King’s School in November 1952; by that time, he and Shirley had arrived upon friendly terms—maintained mostly through correspondence. At that meeting, he told Shirley that he wanted his ashes buried somewhere on school grounds, and they settled on the early Norman memorial chapel. Finally, the two had lunch at Canterbury in November 1960, where Maugham informed the headmaster that he would turn over his library to King’s School. Bibliography: Curtis (1977); Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
SIAM. In 1909 the former Kingdom of Siam (since 1939, Thailand) yielded to Great Britain its rights over four unfederated Malay states and in a 1932 bloodless coup shifted from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one. *Maugham and *Gerald Haxton first visited Bangkok, the capital of Siam, in November 1922, as part of a nine-month tour that included *Burma, *Siam, and *Indochina. There he came down with a serious case of malaria. The account of those travels appears in the narrative *The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930). Maugham, this time in the company of *Alan Searle, returned to Bangkok in late January 1960, in time for the writer’s eighty-sixth birthday on the twentyfifth. Bibliography: Morgan; Webster’s.
SINGAPORE. The capital of the present Republic of Singapore, the city had been attached to the British settlement of Benkoelen from 1919 to 1823, when (1824) it became the property of the East India Company. By 1826 it stood as a part of the colony of the Straits Settlements and ten years later became the capital of the colony of Singapore. Between 1850 and 1940, the city of Singapore developed into a large port and trade center and then a naval base, complete with docks, powerhouses, and repair shops. *Maugham and *Gerald Haxton came to Singapore in March 1921, the writer
SITWELL, DAME EDITH LOUISA
255
observing carefully from Government House and his headquarters in the Hotel Van Dyke the population of Moslems, Malays, Chinese, and Indians governed by British civil servants. Both the civil servants and planters attracted his artistic eye. The fruits of the venture came in two short story collections, *The Casuarina Tree (1926) and *Ah King (1933). Bibliography: Morgan; Webster’s.
SISLEY, ALFRED (1839–1899). French impressionist painter, born in Paris of English ancestry. After early training in Paris, Sisley joined Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841–1819) in the Paris teaching studio of the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre (1806–1874). There he came under the influence of the French landscape painter Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796– 1875). He focused almost exclusively upon painting landscapes, particularly in the valleys of the Seine, Loire, and Thames. His subtle treatment of skies became especially noteworthy. However, only after his death did his works become popular. In December 1949, while in Paris, *Maugham purchased a large Sisley landscape, as usual, in the name of his daughter, *Liza Maugham Hope. It had to be shipped from Paris to the *Villa Mauresque by train. Bibliography: Cordell; Crystal; Morgan; Vinson.
SITWELL, DAME EDITH LOUISA (1887–1964). English poet, born in the north of Scarborough, the sister of *Sir Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969) and Sir Sacheverell Sitwell (1897–1988). Sitwell first attracted notice by editing an annual anthology of new poetry, Wheels (1916–1921). Her own experimental poetry, reviewed under loud and considerable controversy, appeared in Facade (1922), which, in June 1923, she read in public in London, accompanied by music by William Turner Walton (1902–1983) and catcalls from the audience. Created a dame in 1954, Sitwell converted to Roman Catholicism in 1955; her poetry then reflected a deep religious symbolism, as seen in The Outcasts (1962). In addition to the family estate in Derbyshire, Edith Sitwell maintained a flat in St. Petersburg Place, London, where she gave tea parties and became known for her hats. Her autobiography, Taken Care Of, appeared posthumously in 1965. In November 1936, *Maugham spent a weekend with the Sitwells at their seventeenth-century family estate, Renishaw Hall, located in the coal-mining district of Derbyshire. The activities included a costume party in Maugham’s honor. When Maugham received the Companion of Honour in June 1954, Edith Sitwell found herself on the same list, and in 1958, she, Maugham, and *Sir Winston Churchill were elected vice presidents of the *Royal Society of Literature. Bibliography: Cordell; DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
256
SITWELL, SIR FRANCIS OSBERT SACHEVERELL
SITWELL, SIR FRANCIS OSBERT SACHEVERELL (1892–1969). English writer born in London, the brother of *Edith Sitwell and Sir Sacheverell Sitwell. After studying at Eton, Sitwell served (with reluctance) in World War I, after which he began to write poetry, an example of which may be found in The Winstonburg Line (1919). He acquired notoriety with his satirical novel of life in Scarborough society, Before the Bombardment (1927). In 1942, he received a baronetcy. Sitwell’s reputation, however, lies with his five-volume autobiographical series, the first of which, Left Hand: Right Hand, appeared in 1944. Other collections of essays include Penny Foolish (1935) and Pound Wise (1963). *Maugham had known Sitwell at least as early as February 1922, for he was one of the guests at Maugham’s dinner party in which *Sinclair Lewis demonstrated his drunken and boorish behavior. Then, in September 1931, Maugham met T. S. Eliot at a dinner hosted by Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell in London. At *Liza Maugham’s wedding to *Vincent Paravicini in London on 24 July 1936, Osbert Sitwell numbered among the guests, and on 11 December 1936, when Edward VIII gave up his throne for the woman he loved (Mrs. Wallis Simpson), Maugham, *Eddie Marsh, and Osbert Sitwell sat together and heard the king’s abdication speech on a portable radio in the lounge of Claridge’s, London. Finally, Sitwell had become a member of *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome Maugham’s close circle of friends, and on 1 August 1955, following her death, he wrote a letter to the Times (London), extolling the virtues of her charm, personality, and career as an interior decorator. Bibliography: Curtis (1977); DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
SIX STORIES WRITTEN IN THE FIRST PERSON SINGULAR (1931). A collection of short stories, published at Garden City, New York, by Doubleday, Doran and Company, and in London by *William Heinemann; reprinted by Arno Press (1977). All of the pieces set in England and/or on the European continent. The stories include *‘‘The Alien Corn,’’ *‘‘The Creative Impulse,’’ *‘‘The Human Element,’’ *‘‘Jane,’’ *‘‘The Round Dozen,’’ and *‘‘Virtue.’’ SMITH: A COMEDY IN FOUR ACTS (1913). A play, produced at the Comedy Theatre, Panton Street, Haymarket, London, on 30 September 1909, directed by *Dion (Dot) Boucicault (1859–1929), starring *Marie Lohr (1890–1975; replaced in October by Irene Vanbrugh [1872–1949]) and Robert Loraine (1976– 1935), and running for 168 performances; revived in 1937 at London for 30 performances; opened in New York in 1910, starring John Drew (1853–1927), for 112 performances; published in London by *William Heinemann (1913) and in Chicago by Dramatic Publishing (1913). Jury Studios, London, produced a film version in 1917. In 1911, one David Gray (1870–?) published Smith: A Novel Based on the Play by W. Somerset Maugham (New York: Duffield). Reportedly, Smith stands as the first play in the history of the theater to open
SMITH: A COMEDY IN FOUR ACTS
257
with a game of bridge. For *Maugham (as well as for the times) the game represented the indifference of the bourgeoisie to the plight of the unfortunates. At the table, †Mrs. Rose Dallas-Baker, †Algernon Peppercorn, †Emily Chapman, and †Cynthia Rosenberg discuss the forthcoming arrival of †Thomas Freeman, Rose’s brother. The wife of †Herbert Dallas-Baker, a king’s counsel, Rose does everything in her power to maintain order within her home and social life while, one suspects, attempting to carry on a mild relationship with the penniless and outwardly parasitic Peppercorn. Beautiful Cynthia Rosenberg, formerly Cynthia Russell, is married to †Otto Rosenberg, a German Jew considerably older than his wife and a naturalized British citizen of the past ten years. They have a six-week-old child who is always ill. Emily Chapman represents the physically and spiritually unattractive side of the group. At age thirty-two, she appears dark, worn, and rather haggard. Heavy applications of rouge and eye shadow cannot conceal her spiritual discomfort, the result of three failed engagements to Thomas Freeman, to a soldier, and to a Jew. In addition, she is £300 in debt. Finally, Freeman represents exactly what his name implies—a free man. At age thirty-five, strong and muscular, a ruinous experience in the Stock Exchange failed to dampen his spirit or enthusiasm. After working in a Johannesburg hotel as a luggage porter, he bought a 2,000-acre farm in Rhodesia, where he has spent the last eight years. He has returned to England in search of a wife. Freeman recognizes, almost immediately after his arrival in the Dallas-Baker household, the falseness and pretentiousness of the society in which his sister and her friends function. The practicality that governs life in the colonies has no place here, as witnessed by his inability to understand why Cynthia Rosenberg plays bridge instead of being at home nursing her sick child or why Algernon Peppercorn can succeed quite well by living off others. Freeman then happens to meet †Mary Smith, the Dallas-Bakers’ tall, handsome, and twentyyear-old parlormaid. One of eleven children of a farmer and his wife, she walks with honest grace and dignity, and she had been in service at several country houses before being brought to London by the Dallas-Bakers. In the meantime, Freeman’s inquiries about Cynthia and his sister’s relationship with Peppercorn upset Rose, who challenges her brother’s right to disrupt her home and social life. However, the play returns to its plot when Emily Chapman manages to extract another proposal of marriage from Freeman. She accepts, and the principals return to the bridge table. In the midst of the game, Smith informs Cynthia Rosenberg of an urgent telephone call from Otto, but the former refuses to disrupt the game and tells Smith to take the message. The other players (Rose, Herbert, and Peppercorn) become irritated by the interruption. Smith returns to announce the death of the Rosenberg baby, at which point Peppercorn escorts Cynthia home, and Herbert Dallas-Baker returns to his office. Again, Rose becomes angry with her brother and orders him from her house. Emily promises to intercede and to reconcile Freeman and Rose, but she also realizes that she must break off her engagement
258
SNELL, ANNE ALICIA TODD
to Freeman, for she no longer loves him. At that point, Smith and Freeman come together for discussions on her background and his work in Rhodesia. Smith cannot understand how Freeman, in her mind a gentleman, can perform manual labor. When he proposes marriage to her, she refuses on the grounds of the radical difference in their class status. The play reaches its conclusion upon the expected notes of solutions and resolutions. Smith expresses her appreciation to Freeman for not having taken advantage of the delicacy of her position when she refused his marriage proposal. Emily Chapman announces that she will depart for a position in New South Wales, Australia, while Cynthia Rosenberg appears to inform those present that Otto will no longer permit his wife to be a part of the Dallas-Baker social circle. That circle further disintegrates when Rose discovers that Peppercorn plans to marry an American heiress, and she orders him from her house. Rose also learns that Freeman has proposed marriage to Smith, and so she dismisses the maid. It all comes to an end with Rose and Herbert’s leaving in search of new friends for new social arrangements, and Freeman’s persuading Smith to marry him. Thus, for Maugham, the free man gets his own way; he can push aside the hypocrisy and callousness of snobbish women and climb up or down the social ladder as he pleases. Bibliography: Collected Plays. I.; Barnes; Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Dottin (1937); Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan; Ward.
SNELL, ANNE ALICIA TODD (1819–1904). *Maugham’s maternal grandmother and mother of *Edith Mary Snell Maugham and *Rose Ellen Snell. The daughter of a Falmouth squire, Francis Todd, she married *Charles Snell in 1837. Following the death of her husband in 1841, she took her children first to England, then to Paris, and finally settled at St. Malo, France, where she wrote sensational novels, children’s stories about orphans and little rich girls who learn humility, and popular songs—all in French, with the novel Notre´ Dame de Bonsecours, ou l’Orpheline du Monastere (1858) being the first. Because carelessness and extravagance considerably limited what amounted to a liberal pension from the East India Company and a substantial inheritance, she had to depend upon her pen. Thus, she preceded her more famous grandson as the first truly professional writer in the family. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Cordell; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
SNELL, MAJOR CHARLES (1791–1841). *Maugham’s maternal grandfather and the father of *Edith Mary Snell Maugham and *Rose Ellen Snell. The son of a sailmaker, Robert Snell (and his wife *Anne), he enlisted in the service of the East India Company and eventually settled in *India following his marriage to Anne Alicia Todd in 1837. He died on 3 June 1841 at Mandum, near Seringapatam, of ill health from the unwholesome climate. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Cordell; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
‘‘SOME NOVELISTS I HAVE KNOWN’’
259
SNELL, ROSE ELLEN (1841–1869). *Maugham’s maternal aunt, younger sister of *Edith Mary Snell Maugham, and daughter of *Anne Alicia Todd and *Charles Snell—she being born eight weeks after the death of her father. She grew up in England, where her mother had taken her sister and her in the fall of 1841, then in Paris, and finally St. Malo, where the three eventually settled. As did her mother, Rose Snell dabbled in literature, her novels La Famille du Pecheur and La Fete d’une Mere, Suivie de: Adele et Lucie being published at Lille sometime after 1858. She died from tuberculosis and was buried in the Cemetery of St. Servan, adjoining St. Malo. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
‘‘THE SOCIAL SENSE’’ (1929, 1936). A short story, published initially in 1929 and included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). The †Narrator begrudgingly attends a dinner party hosted by Mr. and Mrs. †Macdonald, who ‘‘suffer from the delusion that if they asked six persons to dine with them who had nothing in the world to say to one another, the party would be a failure, but if they multiplied it by three and asked eighteen it must be a success.’’ However, he is relieved to discover the presence of †Thomas Wharton, once, but no longer, a prominent portrait painter, and his wife, †Mary, in her day a well-known concert singer. Now, at age fifty-three, Mary appears haggard. She had married Thomas because she thought he would become a great painter; upon realizing that he had achieved nothing beyond being a decent craftsman, she felt cheated. Further, without restraint, she expressed her exasperation in public. For the past twenty-five years, Mary Wharton had been involved in an affair with the physically unattractive †Gerrard Manson, who, at age sixty, had died in a nursing home on the very afternoon of the Macdonalds’ dinner party. A brilliant critic and essayist married to the fat, frowzy, and terribly boring †Mrs. Manson, he was the father of three grown daughters. Thomas Wharton, deeply in love with his wife and excessively jealous, warned Mary to keep her distance from Manson, but she refused. His death has been a severe shock to Mary Wharton, yet she attends the Macdonalds’ dinner party. Why? ‘‘ ‘He [Manson] was everything I had in the world, but I couldn’t let the party down, could I? He always said I had a social sense.’ ’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over.
‘‘SOME NOVELISTS I HAVE KNOWN’’ (1952). A forty-nine-page essay published in the collection *The Vagrant Mood. A part of it had been included in Life and Letters, a periodical founded and edited from 1928 to 1933 by Desmond MacCarthy (1877–1952). *Maugham combines critical observation and personal recollections, declaring at the outset, ‘‘I should like to make it quite clear that though I knew the authors I am going to speak of over a long period I was not really intimate with any of
260
SOMERSET MAUGHAM
them.’’ The discussion includes *Henry James (1943–1916), *Herbert George Wells (1866–1946), *Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), Lady Elizabeth Russell (Elizabeth Von Arnim [1866–1941]), and *Edith Newbold Jones Wharton (1861–1937). The tone of the essay proves far more interesting than its highly anecdotal substance. Thus, in regard to his brief but traumatic encounter with Wharton, Maugham states: ‘‘Her manner was that of a woman to whom a man has made proposals offensive to her modesty, but which her good breeding tells her it will be more dignified to ignore than to make a scene about. ‘I’m afraid it’s getting very late,’ said Mrs. Wharton. I knew that my audience was at an end. I never saw her again. She was an admirable creature, but not my cup of tea.’’ On that note, the essay comes to an abrupt end. Bibliography: Vagrant Mood.
SOMERSET MAUGHAM. The name of a British tanker. At *Maugham’s funeral service at Canterbury, Kent, in December 1965, appeared a spray of flowers from ‘‘Skipper Brittle and the crew of the tanker Somerset Maugham.’’ Bibliography: Robin Maugham (1978).
SOMERSET MAUGHAM PRIZE. In April 1947, principally from the royalties amassed from the sales of, and film rights to, *The Razor’s Edge (1944), *Maugham established a prize that would allow British writers to spend time abroad. Thus, the annual £500 Somerset Maugham Prize would come from a trust fund of $49,000, to be administered by the Society of Authors, the judges being Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910–), Cecil Day-Lewis (1904– 1972), and Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett (1900–). The writer had to be Britishborn, under the age of thirty-five, and had to have published one book. Among those who have taken advantage of the prize, which still exists (but with some modifications in the writer’s qualifications) are such writers as Elizabeth Joan Jennings (1926–), Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), John Le Carre (David John Moore Cornwell [1931–]), Doris Mary Taylor Lessing (1919–), John Barrington Wain (1925–), Vidaidhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932–), Thomson William Gunn (1929–), and Edward James (Ted) Hughes (1930–). Bibliography: Morgan.
‘‘THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM THEATRE.’’ See ‘‘TELLER OF TALES.’’ SOTHEBY PARKE BERNET. Currently located at 34–35 New Bond Street and 19 Bloomfield Place, London, the fine arts auctioneering firm and evaluators of fine arts came into existence in 1744, established by Samuel Baker (1712– 1778), a London bookseller, publisher, and book auctioneer. Initially, the firm held only one sale each year, until 1754, when Baker opened sale rooms in Yorke Street, Covent Garden; beginning in collaboration with Abraham Lang-
SPAIN
261
ford, sales of books and general objects occurred with greater frequency. In 1767, Baker joined in partnership with another London bookseller and auctioneer, George Leigh (?–1815); after Baker’s death, Leigh carried on the business alone until 1780, when Baker’s nephew, John Sotheby (1740–1807), joined the firm, to be succeeded by three generations of the family. In 1818, the firm moved to No. 13 Wellington Street, the Strand, where it remained until moving to its present location in 1917. The family connection came to an end in 1861, with the death by drowning of Samuel Leigh Sotheby (1805–1861). From the 1860s until 1913, Sotheby’s concerned itself principally with book auctions. However, when Montague Barlow moved the firm to Bond Street, it began a serious challenge to Christie’s as art auctioneers. In 1964, Sotheby’s purchased the New York auctioneering firm of Parke Bernet and three years later acquired Hodgson’s, a book auctioneering firm at Chancery Lane. Sotheby’s Parke Bernet opened new rooms in Bloomfield Place in May 1981 for the sale of books, manuscripts, coins, medals, and jewelry. For 1978–1979, the firm claimed that international sales totaled £181,500,000, with London sales at £82,370,000. On 7 December 1955, *Sir Gerald Kelly, *Maugham’s longtime friend and portrait painter, sold his art collection and library at Sotheby’s to raise money to purchase the home in Gloucester Place, London, in which he had lived for a number of years and from which he had been threatened with eviction. Among the items, Kelly owned the manuscript of *The Moon and Sixpence (1919), and another of Maugham’s friends, *Jerome Zipkin, bidding against Yale University Library, purchased it for £2,600, a record price for a manuscript by a living author. Eventually, Zipkin donated the text to the University of Texas. At some point in the fall of 1961, Maugham had determined to sell thirtyfive pictures from his art collection, supposedly to raise funds for needy writers. *Alan Searle met with Peter Wilson, chairman of Sotheby’s, to arrange for the sale, the auction to take place on 10 April 1962. Maugham himself was too ill to attend the Bond Street event, which attracted some 2,500 persons hustled into five galleries linked by closed-circuit television. Wilson personally conducted the auction. The proceeds from the sale totaled $1,466,864. Bibliography: Allibone; DNB; Plomer (1932/1968); Weinreb and Hibbert; Morgan.
SPAIN. *Maugham’s initial visit to Spain began in early December 1897 with his arrival in Seville, and he remained until April 1899. He visited Ronda, Carmona, Ecija, Toledo, Granada, Jerez, and Cadiz. In Spain he wrote *‘‘The Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian’’ (1898), his first published story; and the stories *‘‘The Choice of Amyntas,’’ *‘‘Faith (both 1899), and *‘‘The Spanish Priest’’ (1906). He also finished a novel that he tentatively entitled ‘‘The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey’’ (a thorough revision of which would appear in 1915 as *Of Human Bondage); completed his first full-length play, *A Man of Honour (1903); and worked on a travel book on Spain, *The Land of the
262
‘‘THE SPANISH PRIEST’’
Blessed Virgin (1905). He returned to Seville briefly in April 1903 as preparation for a revision of The Land of the Blessed Virgin, then again in spring 1914, this time as part of a motor car trip to Biarritz and Spain with *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome. The next journey occurred in October 1933, when the fifty-nineyear-old Maugham visited Granada, Seville, and Cordoba. With *Alan Searle, he toured Spain in April 1948, principally to research an essay on the seventeenth-century Spanish religious painter Francisco de Zubaran (1598–1664). He went to Barcelona to see his publisher, Jose Janes, then went on to Madrid. Both writer and secretary/companion returned for another visit in October 1949, but the stay had to be curtailed when both suffered from some form of food poisoning. Finally, the writer went to Spain in September 1954 to spend time with whom he termed the only polite people in Europe, before embarking upon his annual year-end visit to London. In 1935 appeared Maugham’s *Don Fernando, a travel narrative on Spain, combined with observations and reactions upon figures from the nation’s golden age of the sixteenth century. His final novel, *Catalina (1948), concerns Spain during the Inquisition period. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990, (1972/1973); Cordell; Morgan.
‘‘THE SPANISH PRIEST’’ (1906). A short story, published in the Illustrated London News for 6 January 1906. The †Narrator sits in a bar on Gibraltar, watching the faces of a variety of people. There he meets an †English Man, the former manager of a copper pyrite mine at Seville, who relates to him the story of †Vicente Oria y Mazallon, a Spanish priest from Granada. Ten years earlier the priest had brought him a sample of ore from an old Roman mine near Granada that turns out to be gold, but he does not tell the English Man the location of the site. The English Man spends three years searching for the priest and several more trying to uncover the location of the mine. Finally, the English Man discovers, in a cave, the skeleton of the priest. He searches every inch of the land for ten miles around but discovers nothing. Bibliography: Whitehead (1987).
SQUIRE, RONALD [Ronald Squirl] (1886–1958). Described as a jovial British character actor who first appeared on the stage in 1909 and began doing film roles in 1934. His film credits in England include Don’t Take It to Heart (1934), While the Sun Shines (1946), Woman Hater (1948), The Rocking-Horse Winner (1950), Encore (1952), The Million Pound Note (1954), Now and Forever (1955), and Count Your Blessings (1958). In the United States, he appeared in My Cousin Rachel (1953). Squire played †Charles Battle, the London stockbroker who walks out on his wife and parasitic children in *The Bread-Winner (1930). In *S. N. Behrman’s 1946 stage version of *Maugham’s short story *‘‘Jane’’ (1931), Squire played
ST. THOMAS’ HOSPITAL, LONDON
263
William Tower, Behrman’s character of Maugham, whom the playwright developed from the †Narrator of the story. Bibliography: Halliwell; Morgan.
ST. HELIER, LADY SUSAN MARIE ELIZABETH STEWARTMACKENZIE JEUNE (?–1931). A daughter of Keith Stewart-Mackenzie of Seaforth, Lady St. Helier married, first in 1871, Colonel Constantine Stanley of Alderley, to whom she bore a daughter, Dorothy. Then, in 1881, she wed Sir Francis Henry Jeune (1843–1905), a queen’s counsel and jurist who, upon retirement, was created Lord St. Helier. A son, Christian Francis Seaforth Jeune (1882–1904), a member of the Grenadier Guards, served in the Boer War and died at Poona of enteric fever. Lady St. Helier gained a reputation both for her service to the poor and as a brilliant hostess at her house at No. 52 Portland Place, London. Her prose publications include Lesser Questions (London and Sydney: Remington; five editions through 1895), a collection of her essays on women’s issues in Great Britain, technical education, the Salvation Army, and domestic problems relating to the poor; Memoirs of Fifty Years (London: E. Arnold, 1909), including reminiscences of, and correspondence with, English writers; and shared authorship—with Marie Corelli [Mary Mackay] (1855– 1924), Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929), and Lady Susan Hamilton Ardagh, countess of Malmesbury—of The Modern Marriage Market (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1900), concerning marriage in literature. Lady St. Helier served as an alderman in the London County Council and frequently contributed essays on social issues to leading reviews and magazines. She died on 25 January 1931. Young *Maugham gained entrance to Lady St. Helier’s widely varied social circle initially at some point between 1901 and 1905, when Augustus Hare (1834–1903), the snobbish travel writer, introduced him to the noted London hostess. The playwright and novelist dined at her Portland Place house on at least three occasions. On one of them, he met the aged *Thomas Hardy (1840– 1928), and on another, a luncheon in November 1908, the American writer of fiction *Edith Wharton (1862–1937), whom he never saw again. Maugham also became friendly with Lady St. Helier’s daughter, Dorothy Stanley, who in 1896 had married Augustus Henry Eden Allhusen (1867–1925), a wealthy member of Parliament. Dorothy also entertained at her large house in Stoke Poges, near Windsor, and there Maugham met *Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874– 1965). Bibliography: ‘‘Some Novelists,’’ Vagrant Mood; DNB; Morgan; Who Was Who, 1929–1940.
ST. THOMAS’ HOSPITAL, LONDON. In the late nineteenth century, St. Thomas’ Hospital functioned as a teaching institution, meaning that it also housed a medical school. It sprang up in Southwark, at the south end of London
264
ST. THOMAS’ HOSPITAL, LONDON
Bridge, in the twelfth century, and by 1551 had been reorganized by royal charter as a hospital for the poor. It remained as such until 1868, when the institution had to move from Southwark because the city planners required a portion of the site for the new London Bridge and Charing Cross Railway. Thus, the hospital relocated to Lambeth Palace Road on the south bank of the River Thames and directly across from the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. On 13 May 1868, Queen Victoria laid the foundation for an institution that would attract patients principally from the adjacent slums of Lambeth. Henry Currey designed the structure, based on a block principle that followed the current Continental pattern, one approved by the energetic Florence Nightingale (1820– 1910), who established the Nightingale Training School of Nursing at St. Thomas’. The medical school opened in 1871. In general, the approximately two hundred students followed a medical school curriculum that emphasized surgery and treatment of the common diseases, the major courses being anatomy and biology; no doubt instruction and practice improved after 1892, when electricity became available. By 1900, St. Thomas’s had established eleven special departments for outpatients: ophthalmic, throat, skin, ear, teeth, electrotherapeutics, X-ray, vaccination, mental diseases, diseases of women, and diseases of children. Students received additional instruction in the stethoscope, the dispensing of mixtures, and the preparation of ointments. After passing the examination in materia medica, the student would work in the wards, principally serving as clerk to one of the assistant physicians who treated outpatients—St. Thomas’s received as many as 25,000 of them per year. Then, in 1888, St. Thomas’s added a gynecology department, and students underwent three months of practical instruction in midwifery. The majority of students pursued the five-year curriculum of the Conjoint Board of the College of Surgeons and the College of Physicians; however, if one wanted to pursue further studies, he could earn a degree from the University of London. Students could receive prizes for overall scholarship, as well as serve as assistants in the clinics or as dressers for staff physicians. The major texts for first-year students included the popular Demonstrations of Anatomy: Being a Guide to the Knowledge of the Human Body by Dissection (London: Smith, Elder, and Company, 1841; four editions through 1856; seventh edition in 1874), by George Viner Ellis (1812–1900), and Bones and Joints, by Dr. Edward Ward. On 27 September 1892, at age eighteen, *Maugham registered as one of sixty entering students at the medical school of St. Thomas’ Hospital, where he would remain until 1897. As a ‘‘perpetual student,’’ he could study there for as long as he chose, without having to qualify for a license. He still had his annuity of £150 per year from his father’s estate, which proved sufficient to cover tuition, books, and board and lodging. If one can sift carefully and discriminately through the trials and traumas of †Philip Carey in *Of Human Bondage (1915), the particulars of the routine at St. Thomas’s (or ‘‘St. Luke’s,’’ as Maugham renames the institution) come forth clearly. He served as a dresser in the surgical
THE STAGE SOCIETY
265
wards; he assisted surgeons in operations by handing them instruments, sponges, or dressings; he worked at nights in the casualty ward, providing aid in accident cases; he made rounds with the house physicians in the inpatients’ wards; he served the required three-week duty as an obstetrics clerk. The last-stated assignment allowed him to bring some sixty children into the world and, no doubt, provided him with the details for the childbirth episodes in the novels *Liza of Lambeth (1897) and *Mrs. Craddock (1902). If nothing else, those practical experiences outside the laboratory and lecture hall increased Maugham’s interest in the detailed aspects of applied medicine. In October 1897, Maugham passed his examinations, received his diplomas and licenses in medicine and surgery (member of the Royal College of Surgeons and licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians), and then walked away from it all, never to practice medicine for a single day of his remaining life. Bibliography: Summing Up; Cordell; McInnes; Morgan; Weinreb and Hibbert.
THE STAGE SOCIETY. The Incorporated Stage Society of London came into being in 1899 for the production of plays of artistic merit that had little chance for performance in commercial theaters. Such plays would be presented with West End casts at a West End theater for one or two performances, usually on Sunday evenings when a theater became available. The first performance occurred on 26 November 1899, with *George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell; naturally, because of the Sabbath, the police raided the Royalty Theatre and disrupted the event. The list of the Society’s productions numbered two hundred plays, including initial English performances of pieces by Shaw (1856–1950) and such nonEnglish playwrights as Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann (1862–1946), Maxim Gorky [Alexey Maksimovich Peshkov] (1868–1936), Nikolay Vasilievich Gogol (1809–1852), Frank Wedekind (1864–1918), Georg Kaiser (1878–1945), Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), Jean Jacques Bernard (1888–1972), Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), and Clifford Odets (1906–1963). In 1927, the Stage Society joined with the Three Hundred Club, also a Sunday play-producing organization, founded in 1924. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the society became inactive and has not been revived. After having rewritten *A Man of Honour (completed originally in Rome in 1898), *Maugham sent the new version to the selection committee of the Stage Society, and that body accepted it. It opened at the Imperial Theatre, Westminster, on the evening of 22 February 1903 and then ran for a matinee on the following day. *Harley Granville-Barker (1877–1946) played †Basil Kent. Because Maugham wanted for his plays a wider audience, longer runs, and commercial success, he had little interest in the Stage Society following his initial experience. Bibliography: Freedley and Reeves; Hartnoll; Morgan.
266
STEEVENS, CHRISTINA STEWART
STEEVENS, CHRISTINA STEWART [MRS. GEORGE] (fl. 1880–1910). The wife of George Warrington Steevens (1869–1900), correspondent for the Daily Mail, author of military narratives, and a classical scholar who died at Ladysmith of enteric fever during the Boer War. Mrs. Steevens comes forth as a highly interesting figure on the Victorian-Edwardian social scene. An American of Scottish descent, she reportedly played a part in the divorce proceedings of 1886 that ruined the political career of the radical politician Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843–1911) and as a result became somewhat of a social outcast. However, she possessed considerable wealth of her own, and she therefore involved herself with philanthropic projects in London, specifically a soup kitchen in Marylebone, a day nursery for the poor, and an orphanage. The largest proportion of her household staff proved to have been products of that orphanage. Her marriage to George Steevens occurred in 1894. At some point she purchased Merton Abbey, a stately home once occupied by Admiral Horatio Nelson and Lady Hamilton near Clapham Common and some eight miles from the center of London, where she entertained—mostly on Sunday afternoons and Tuesday evenings—writers, theatrical personages, and politicians. *Maugham, beginning about 1903 or 1904, became one of the regular visitors at Mrs. Steevens’ home, a place where a not yet affluent artist could always find lunch or dinner. There he associated with *Max Beerbohm, and there he met the first woman whom he really loved, the actress *Ethelwyn Sylvia (Sue) Jones. Maugham dedicated his 1907 novel *The Explorer, ‘‘To my dear Mrs. G. W. Steevens,’’ and she may well have been the model for †Lady Frederick Berolles in his play of the same year, *Lady Frederick. Bibliography: Behrman (1960); Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1977); DNB; Morgan.
STERN, GLADYS BERTHA [BRONWYN] (1890–1973). The second daughter of Albert and Elizabeth Schwabacher Stern, who had involved themselves in the gem industry and lost their money in the financial collapse of 1904 that followed the Boer War. From age fourteen, Stern lived with her family in cheap hotels, boardinghouses, and flats, then traveled with them (1906) to *Germany and *Switzerland. Her schooling included Notting Hill High School, London, schools in Germany and Switzerland, and the Academy of Dramatic Art. After juvenile attempts at drama and poetry, she published the first of her forty novels, Pantomime, in 1914, followed by Twos and Threes (1916), the first piece to receive serious critical attention. Stern came to be known for her fictional but autobiographically based series about a Jewish family by the name of Rakonitz: The Tents of Israel (1924; reissued in 1948 as The Matriarch), A Deputy Was King (1926), Mosaic (1930), Shining and Free (1935), and The Young Matriarch (1942). In 1919, Stern married Geoffrey Lisle Holdsworth, a New Zealand journalist, whom she eventually divorced. Having converted to Roman Catholicism in 1947, she recorded the experience in All in Good Time (1954). A woman of abundant size and weight, she was known as ‘‘Peter’’ to her friends.
STRACHEY, GYLES LYTTON
267
At some point during the early stages of her career, *Maugham had helped Stern financially, as he tended to do with a number of young writers who required material sustenance to survive while they wrote. By late 1933, she had become his second closest friend, *Barbara Back holding the first position. In June 1937 she joined Maughan and *Gerald Haxton on a trip to the Scandinavian countries and, naturally, became a regular visitor to the *Villa Mauresque and a frequent correspondent. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan; Shattock.
STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR (1850–1894). Born in Edinburgh, *Scotland, son of Thomas Stevenson, joint-engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses, young Stevenson studied at the University of Edinburgh and entered the law in 1875. However, his real interest focused upon the writing of plays and then travel sketches, essays, and short stories for magazines. Fame came to him through the romantic adventure novel Treasure Island (1883), and he followed that course with Kidnapped (1886), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), and the unfinished and posthumously published Weir of Hermiston (1896). Stevenson will also be remembered for his poetry collection, A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), and for his Vailima Letters (1895) to Sir Sidney Colvin (1845–1927). In 1888, ill with tuberculosis, he settled with his family at Vailima, on the island of American Samoa, where he died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage. During *Maugham’s brief but memorable and productive visit to American Samoa in late December 1916 and early January 1917, he visited Stevenson’s grave above Apia. Because Stevenson had preceded Maugham in visiting the South Seas, and because he touched upon the traveler and the recluse in his fiction, certain of Maugham’s critics have been tempted to compare and/or contrast the two. However, other than occasional similarities in locale, their lives, their personal philosophies, and their art really did not reside upon common ground. Bibliography: DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
STRACHEY, GYLES LYTTON (1880–1932). English biographer and essayist, born in London, the eleventh child of a soldier and public administrator who had served for more than thirty years in India. Strachey began his higher education at Liverpool University, then went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he formed friendships with George Edward Moore (1873–1958), John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), and Leonard Sidney Woolf (1880–1969). A conscientious objector during World War I, when he knitted mufflers for soldiers and sailors, he tried unsuccessfully to establish an academic career, then began to write for such periodicals as the Spectator, Edinburgh Review, Nation, Athenaeum, and Life and Letters. Recognition finally came to Strachey in 1918 with the publication of his Eminent Victorians, a collection of four essays on Cardinal
268
‘‘STRAIGHT FLUSH’’
Henry Edward Manning (1808–1892), Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), and General Charles George Gordon (1833–1885). With that volume, Strachey thrust biography from history into the realm of subjective and creative literature. Then followed a full-length biography of Queen Victoria (1921); Books and Characters (1922); a highly controversial Freudian study, Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928); Portraits in Miniature (1931); and the posthumous Characters and Commentaries (1933). During the last sixteen years of his life, Strachey enjoyed a me´nage a` trois with the painter Dora Carrington (1893–1932) and her husband, Ralph Partidge. The exact extent of *Maugham’s acquaintance and relationship with Lytton Strachey becomes difficult to assess, since the former and *Alan Searle destroyed, in the fireplace at *Villa Mauresque in 1958, the then-extant correspondence between the two. However, Strachey did occasionally comment upon Maugham’s work, and he had enjoyed a relationship with Alan Searle before the latter succeeded *Gerald Haxton as Maugham’s secretary/companion. Bibliography: DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
‘‘STRAIGHT FLUSH’’ (1929). A short story, published initially in 1929, then included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). The †Narrator, an author, and his fellow passengers, all rich old men, play cards while on a ship from *Hong Kong. At one point during a lull, the frail †Rosenbaum and the hardy Scot †Donaldson share a bottle of champagne with the Narrator, who listens and reports on both of their stories relative to playing poker. Donaldson and two brothers, †Jamie McDermott and †Eddie McDermott, had staked out a claim in California. One night the three got drunk and played poker; Eddie accused Jamie of cheating, whereupon the latter shot his brother. After that incident, McDermott swore that he would never again drink or play cards. Then, after McDermott retires, Rosenbaum unfolds a more philosophical tale. He had spent a lifetime playing high-stakes poker in such varied and separated places of the world as Johannesburg, South Africa, and San Francisco. In a game in the California city, he was dealt a straight flush in hearts and could not distinguish the significant marks on the cards; old age had dimmed his sight. Thus, Rosenbaum immediately retired from playing poker; philanthropy has now become his life’s work. Bibliography. Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
STRICTLY PERSONAL (1941). An autobiographical work, originally serialized in The Saturday Evening Post from 29 March through 12 April 1941 under the title ‘‘Novelist’s Flight from France’’; published in 1941 in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday, Doran, and Company, and by *Heinemann in London in 1942; reprinted by Arno Press (1977). In this first-person narrative, *Maugham recounts the long, uncomfortable, and hazardous voyage in 1940 from the French Riviera to England in the early
THE SUMMING UP
269
period of World War II. Aboard *Gerald Haxton’s small yacht *Sara, with its crew of two Italians and a French cabin boy, he was forced to abandon the *Villa Mauresque. He bemoans such events as his family and guests’ all returning to England, his Italian servants’ defecting across the border, and the presence of Senegalese troops forming near his estate. In addition, Maugham found the space to consider at least one of the reasons behind the impending fall of *France:‘‘If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.’’ Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974, 1977).
STRICTLY UNCONVENTIONAL (1930). A motion picture based on the play *The Circle (1921); produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. ‘‘A STRING OF BEADS’’ (1927, 1936). A short story, published initially in 1927 and included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). †Laura tells the †Narrator about an occasion when †Sophie Livingstone and her husband host a dinner party for fourteen persons. One of the guests fails to arrive, and so they ask their governess, †Miss Robinson, to join the party. At age twenty-two, the daughter of a clergyman, and rather pretty, she sits opposite †Count Borselli, who knows more about precious stones than anyone else in the world. Next to the Count sits †Mary Lyngate, who wears a string of pearls valued at £8,000. According to the Count, Miss Robinson’s own necklace must be worth at least £50,000, but she maintains that she paid only fifteen shillings for it. In the middle of the dinner, two †Men from Jarrot’s Stores (where Miss Robinson had bought her necklace) arrive and ask to speak with Miss Robinson. When she returns, she places the necklace upon the table, at which point Count Borcelli claims that this false string is not the same as the one she had on when she left. Miss Robinson counters that when she purchased the false string, the shop †Assistant had mistakenly given her one of considerably more value and that the Men who had interrupted the dinner had come to exchange one for the other. In addition, the Men presented her with a check for £300. Miss Robinson determines to take a holiday at Deauville and spend her entire reward. She meets a rich †Argentine, with whom she goes off to Paris. There she abandons him for a rich †Greek and becomes the smartest cocotte in Paris. Both the Narrator and Laura express regret that the story does not house a moral. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
THE SUMMING UP (1938). An autobiographical essay—but only in the loosest sense of the term ‘‘autobiography’’—published in London by *Heinemann in January and in Garden City, New York, in March by Doubleday, Doran, and Company; reprinted by Arno Press (1977) and Penguin Books (1978). The work sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States alone.
270
SUTHERLAND, GRAHAM VIVIAN
According to *Maugham, the piece constituted neither an autobiography nor a memoir but his attempt to think through the various subjects that had captured his interest during his lifetime. ‘‘Fact and fiction are so integrated in my work,’’ he states in the opening paragraph, ‘‘that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other.’’ He also concerned himself with a discussion on the craft of writing. As the title indicates, Maugham wanted the book to represent a personal summary of his observations and reactions on literature, art, theater, ethics, religion, and philosophy. ‘‘Long habit has made it more comfortable for me to speak through the creatures of my invention. I can decide what they would think more readily than I can decide what I think myself. The one has always been a pleasure to me; the other has been a labour that I have willingly put off. But now I can afford to put it off no longer.’’ Thus, autobiographical incidents that do appear emerge out of chronological order and function more as support for, or complement to, his philosophical notions than they do as conventional autobiography. The volume goes forward until, in the closing chapters, it focuses upon the eventual meaning of life for an individual such as Maugham who does not believe in God—or at least in a God within the conventional Judaic-Christian context. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness serve as his Trinity. In the final paragraph, Maugham declares, ‘‘When I consider the vastness of the universe, with its innumerable stars and its spaces measured by thousands upon thousands of light years, I am overwhelmed with awe, but my imagination cannot conceive a creator of it.’’ Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974, 1977); Epstein; Loss (1987/1988); Morgan; Palmer; Vidal.
SUTHERLAND, GRAHAM VIVIAN (1903–1980). English artist born in London. After his initial studies at the Goldsmiths’ College of Art, London, Sutherland worked mainly as an etcher until 1930. From then until 1940, he established his reputation as a painter in the Romantic mode, focusing principally upon abstract landscapes with majestic coloring. During 1941–1945, he functioned as an official war artist, his best work in that genre being a series of pictures of bombed buildings. Following the war he produced the memorable portraits upon which the better part of his reputation rests: Maugham (1949), Beaverbrook (1951), and Churchill (1953). The last piece had been commissioned by Parliament on the occasion of *Churchill’s eightieth birthday; however, Lady Churchill did not react favorably to Sutherland’s portrait of her husband and refused to display it before the public. Sutherland also designed ceramics, posters, and textiles. In 1962, his large tapestry (accepted in 1957), Christ in Majesty, was hung in the new Coventry Cathedral. His work appears in the Tate Gallery, London; the Musee d’Art, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1947, Sutherland purchased a house in the health and winter resort town
SWITZERLAND
271
of Menton, twelve miles from Nice. He lunched with *Maugham at the *Villa Mauresque in March 1948, and there the idea of a portrait of the writer took seed. However, Sutherland set down the condition that the piece be considered only as an experiment, with no obligation for either party. Beginning 17 February 1949, Maugham sat for Sutherland on ten occasions, each for one hour; by June 1949, Sutherland had completed the picture, measuring four and onehalf feet high and two feet wide. Maugham appears siting on a bamboo stool, his arms and legs crossed, against an apricot background. The subject wore a brown velvet smoking jacket, a red scarf, gray-blue trousers, and tan loafers. Maugham bought the portrait for $35,000 and gave it to his daughter, *Liza Maugham Hope; she, in turn, handed it over in 1951 to the Tate Gallery. In 1954, on the occasion of Maugham’s eightieth birthday, the portrait became a part of Klaus Jonas’ exhibition of Maugham materials at the Times Bookshop, London. Bibliography: Cordell; Curtis (1977); DNB; Morgan; Vinson.
SWINNERTON, FRANK (1884–1982). English essayist, literary critic, and novelist. Swinnerton left school at age fourteen and joined the London publishing firm of Chatto and Windus as an office boy, eventually becoming an editor there. His novels, most of them set in contemporary London, include Nocturne (1917) and Harvest Comedy (1937). He wrote literary criticism for Truth and Nation, The Observer, and The Evening News, while he published several volumes of literary reminiscences such as The Georgian Literary Scene (1935) and two autobiographical works, Swinnerton: An Autobiography (1937) and, some thirty years later, Reflections from a Village (1969). At age ninety-four he published Arnold Bennett: A Last Word (1978). From 1962 to 1966, Swinnerton served as president of the *Royal Literary Fund. Although Swinnerton as a literary critic did not always react favorably to *Maugham’s work, the two became fairly close friends and correspondents. Their relationship began in 1917, after Swinnerton had sent to Maugham a copy of his novel Nocturne, which the latter thoroughly enjoyed for its realism and honesty. He also appreciated the two 1937 works, Harvest Comedy and his first autobiography, in which Swinnerton stated that Maugham had ‘‘a mind without fat.’’ When Maugham’s *Cakes and Ale appeared in 1930, Swinnerton believed that Maugham had achieved first rank as a novelist. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
SWITZERLAND. In late 1915, in the employment of British Intelligence as a simple intermediary between agents and headquarters, *Maugham went first to Lucerne, then to Geneva. Once each week, he would cross Lake Geneva into *France, there to file his reports and receive further instructions. He also managed side trips to Berne. During this period he wrote his play *Caroline (1916; originally entitled *‘‘The Unattainable’’) and gathered material for short story
272
SWITZERLAND
cycle *Ashenden (1928). The supposed fictional details of his activities appear so specific and accurate that a number of intelligence officials believed that the Ashenden stories actually violated the Official Secrets Act. By July 1916, Maugham had seen enough of espionage and asked for his release. In addition to his visits to the rejuvenation clinic of *Dr. Paul Niehans, La Prairie, at Clarens, in the late 1930s, Maugham journeyed to Switzerland on two later occasions because of ill health. In March 1952, the seventy-eight-year-old writer spent two weeks in Switzerland, consulting specialists about his ailments. They told him that he suffered from nervous exhaustion and sent him off to the mountains for two weeks of rest. Then, in late July of the same year, complaining of severe groin pains, he and *Alan Searle flew to Lausanne, where Maugham saw Dr. Pierre Decker, considered the best surgeon in Switzerland. He operated on Maugham for a hernia in September; the patient recovered quickly and left the country at the end of the month. Finally, during November 1961–January 1962, Maugham thought of selling *Villa Mauresque and moving to Switzerland, but he abandoned that idea, believing the country to be too expensive and too dull. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Morgan.
T TAHITI. Once known as Otaheite, Tahiti belongs to the eastern group (Windward Islands) of the Society Islands in French Polynesia. The French settled it in 1843, and it officially became a French colony in 1880. *Maugham and his secretary/companion *Gerald Haxton arrived in Tahiti in February 1917, after having left *Samoa and New Zealand. At the capital of Papeete, they took rooms at the Hotel Tiare (changed to the Hotel de la Fleur— the tiare being Tahiti’s national flower—in *The Moon and Sixpence [1919]), managed by a large, partly Tahitian woman named Louvaina Chapman (d.1918; †Tiare Johnson in the novel). During his stay, Maugham conducted research into *Paul Gauguin’s life on the island (1898–1901), specifically sending Haxton to the bars to find people who had known the painter. As The Moon and Sixpence clearly reveals, Maugham proved more interested in Gauguin than in Tahiti, for he really never attempted to capture the color or the flavor of the island. At a shabby frame house, Maugham discovered a Gauguin picture on the upper glass panel of a door, which he purchased from the owner for 200 francs. At the auction of his paintings at Sotheby’s, London, in April 1962, the piece brought $37,400. By the middle of March, he and Haxton sailed for San Francisco. Bibliography: Morgan; Webster’s.
‘‘THE TAIPAN’’ (1922). A short story, included in the travel collection *On a Chinese Screen. The †Taipan, a grossly overweight Englishman, had come to China thirty years earlier as a clerk and had worked his way to the top position in an important English firm. Originally from the lower-class London suburb of Barnes, he had been educated at St. Paul’s School. Although pleased to be an
274
‘‘TELLER OF TALES’’
Englishman, he has no plans to return to England, even after he retires. On his way back to his office from a first-rate luncheon at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Taipan passes through the English cemetery and takes stock of all those buried there: three officers from the barque Mary Baxter who perished in the typhoon of 1908; two missionaries, with their wives and children, who had been massacred during the Boxer Rebellion; †Edward Mulock, who drank himself to death at age twenty-five; †Mrs. Violet Turner, with whom he had an affair. Then he comes upon two †Coolies digging a grave, an event that bothers him, for he knows of no one who has recently died. He sends his †Boy and the cemetery †Overseer to the cemetery, but they report that they saw no one digging any grave. After retiring for the night, the Taipan has a dream about the grave, awakens, and suddenly wants to go back to England to die. That morning, his employees find him stone-dead. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; On a Chinese Screen.
‘‘TELLER OF TALES.’’ The title of a television series (also known as ‘‘The Somerset Maugham Theatre’’), narrated by *Maugham, that ran for forty onehalf hour episodes on CBS-TV from 18 October 1951 through 28 March 1951 and for seven one-hour episodes on NBC-TV between 2 April 1951 and 10 December 1951. TEMPEST, MARIE (1864–1942). English actress, born Mary Susan Etherington. Trained as a singer, Marie Tempest appeared first in 1885 on the stage in light operas and musical comedy. In 1899, she abandoned her music career for serious acting, eventually appearing principally in dramatic comedies. She played leading roles on both London and New York stages in such plays as the title role in The Marriage of Kitty; Judith Bliss in Hay Fever (1925), by *Noel Coward (1899–1973); Olivia in Mr. Pim Passes By (1919), by Alan Alexander Milne (1882–1958); the title role in the First Mrs. Fraser (1929), by *St. John Greer Ervine (1883–1971); and as Fanny Cavendish in Theatre Royal (1934). Tempest’s film roles include Moonlight Sonata (1938) and Yellow Sands (1938). The recipient of a Dame of the British Empire award in 1937, Marie Tempest continued to act until her death, combining her air of elegance with taste, subtlety, sureness, and superb technique. Her husband, Graham Browne, was a reputable London director. Marie Tempest proved one of *Maugham’s favorite comediennes and leading actresses. She starred as †Lady Dot Worthley in *Mrs. Dot (1908) and again as †Penelope O’Farrell in both the London and Broadway productions of *Penelope (1909). Eventually a friend of Maugham, Tempest became one of the pieces in the composite portrait of the fictional †Julia Lambert Gosselyn in Maugham’s 1937 novel Theatre. Bibliography: DNB; Curtis (1977); Freedley and Reeves; Halliwell; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
THE TENTH MAN. A TRAGIC COMEDY IN THREE ACTS
275
TEMPLE, ARCHBISHOP WILLIAM (1881–1944). The second son of Archbishop Frederick Temple (1821–1902), William Temple proceeded as exhibitioner of Balliol College, Oxford (1900), fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford (1904), headmaster of Repton School (1910), rector of St. James’, Piccadilly, London (1914), canon of Westminster (1919), bishop of Manchester (1921), archbishop of York (1929), and Archbishop of Canterbury (23 April 1942–26 October 1944). Throughout his brief tenure as the head of the Anglican Church, he lingered, mostly in ill health, in the background of the events of World War II. However, his philosophical and theological publications between 1912 and 1939 place him high among the ranks of Anglican Church scholars. The paths of *Maugham and Archbishop William Temple cross only indirectly as relates to the efforts of the writer’s last secretary/companion, *Alan Searle, to impress others. For example, he told Maugham’s friends that he had served as secretary to Archbishop Temple; in reality, the Anglican primate hardly knew Searle. When Searle in 1940 helped to organize a YMCA Forces hut for soldiers at Sternstall Camp, York, to include a canteen and leisure facilities for the troops, the archbishop’s actual secretary, a Mrs. Dorothy HowellThomas, invited him and others to Bishopthorpe, the archbishop’s residence. Thus, the relationship between Searle and Temple amounted to little more than occasional handshakes. Bibliography: DNB; Morgan.
TEN NOVELS AND THEIR AUTHORS (1954). See GREAT NOVELISTS AND THEIR NOVELS. THE TENTH MAN. A TRAGIC COMEDY IN THREE ACTS (1913). A play, completed in December 1909 and produced at the Globe Theatre, London, 24 February 1910, starring Arthur Bourchier (1863–1927), Edmund Maurice, Frances Dillon, and Godfrey Tearle (1884–1953); published in London by *William Heinemann (1913) and in Chicago by Dramatic Publishing (1913). Wardour Films produced a motion picture in 1937. One of *Maugham’s least successful efforts, The Tenth Man stumbles forth upon the dual vehicles of marital unfaithfulness and political corruption. †George Winter, a tall and powerfully built member of Parliament (MP) and a jovial man always in control of his temper, has come up through the social ranks. At sea by age fourteen, he began his career as a clerk in a disreputable stockbrokerage (a bucket shop) at twenty-five shillings per week. From there he grew into a prominent financier and became the Radical MP for the constituency of Middlepool. Long ago, George discovered blackmail as the simplest means to success. For the past four years he has been married to †Catherine Winter, a graceful, strong, and passionate person who openly questions her husband’s political honesty and marital fidelity. Catherine has left George, first for that reason and second because she has fallen in love with †Robert Colby, a Member
276
THEATRE
of Parliament. Handsome, active, and courteous, the forty-year-old-Colby has totally committed himself to his political career and appears destined to take charge of the War Office in the new cabinet of Robert Perigal (who happens to be a first cousin of Catherine Winter’s mother). To make certain that Catherine returns to him in time for the election, George threatens to expose her relationship with Colby, which would thus ruin the latter’s political career. Further, George promises that, in the event of his reelection, he will provide a position for †Edward O’Donnell, a twenty-three-yearold insignificant lackey engaged to Catherine’s sister, †Anne Etchingham. Catherine’s entire family complicates matters, particularly her father, †Lord Francis Etchingham. Good-natured and suffering from gout, Lord Francis functions as the titular head of a half dozen of George Winter’s quasi-fraudulent London companies. Unwittingly in debt to his son-in-law, Lord Francis functions as a mere pawn in Winter’s schemes and a means by which George can hope to control Catherine. However, George Winter also has serious problems. †James Ford, the richest man in Middlepool and director of the Middlepool Investment Trust, has been a friend of George for twenty years. He controls the Dissenting interest in Middlepool, and, in fact he built a Congregational church there out of his own pocket. Twice mayor of Middlepool and extremely honest, Ford represents the one person out of ten—‘‘the tenth man’’—who cannot be bought—and thus cannot be counted on in case George confronts a setback. Allied with Ford stands the †Reverend William Swalecliffe, a married-with-children Nonconformist minister at Middlepool, a busybody, and a person who will support only a candidate whose morals and family status parallel his own. Thus, George needs Catherine more than she needs or wants him. In the end, although George wins the election, his business schemes fall apart, and Catherine insists upon leaving him. Both Catherine’s and Colby’s problems are resolved, however, when George, realizing that he will be discovered and politically and financially ruined, throws himself in front of a train near the Palace Hotel, Middlepool. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan; Ward.
THEATRE (1937). A novel, completed in December 1936 and published in March in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday, Doran, and Company, and in London by *Heinemann (with an initial printing of 20,000 copies); a Bantam Book (paperbound) edition under the the title *Woman of the World (1951); New Bantam Book edition (paperbound) under the title Theatre (1959); reprinted Arno Press, 1977. A dramatic comedy version of the original novel by Helen Jerome and Guy Reginald Bolton (1884–1979) appeared on Broadway, New York, 12 November 1941, starring Cornelia Otis Skinner (1902–1979) and produced and directed by John Golden; it ran for sixty-nine performances. At Paris in 1955, Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon produced a French stage version under the title Adorable Julia; it ran for almost three years.
THEATRE
277
†Julia Lambert, an actress, meets †Michael Gosselyn, a handsome actor turned producer/manager/director, and falls passionately in love with him. A native of Jersey and the daughter of a veterinarian there, she had learned French from her widowed aunt, †Madame Carrie Falloux, who had married a French coal merchant at St. Malo. †Jane Taitbout, an old actress and a socie´taire of the Comedie Franc¸aise had, at St. Malo, introduced the twelve-year-old Julia to acting. At age sixteen, she enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Gower Street, London. After two years on the stage, she joined (at age twenty) the company of †James Langton at Middlepool. A year later, she met Michael. At age fifty-two, when the novel opens, Michael Gosselyn has retained his handsome figure. Educated at Cambridge, he, too, had been engaged by James Langton’s Middlepool company, after which he spent a single season in the United States. However, although Michael marries Julia Lambert, and they have a son, †Roger Gosselyn, he does not respond to the degree that she desires and needs. Michael goes off to war, and upon his return, she discovers her indifference toward him, which, in turn, leads to her liberation from him. They find that they can exist together in a state of professional amiability. Michael directs his interest and energy to the theater company that he and Julia own, purchased with a loan from his godmother, the wealthy, aged, and ugly widow †Dolly De Vries. At age forty-six, Julia embarks on an affair with †Thomas Fennell, a twenty-two-year-old accountant. Initially an articled clerk in the firm of Lawrence and Humphreys, Tom works his way into a junior partnership and is employed by Michael Gosselyn at the Sarah Siddons Theatre to examine the books. Nonetheless, despite her affair with Tom, Julia continues to sense an unwanted dependence upon her young lover. In her mind, her love and passion represent a threat to her art. She can gain complete freedom only through her profession. Acting—a creative art—becomes her true salvation, and reality exists for her upon the stage. A challenge arises in the form of †Avice Chrichton, a young blond actress and more than a close friend of Thomas Fennell. Tom claimed that he could obtain a part for her in Michael and Julia Gosselyn’s next play, and eventually Michael engages her to play the role of Honor in Nowadays. Julia rises to the task and upstages Avice. In the end, Julia Lambert Gosselyn, through her dramatic creativity, triumphs over Michael, her husband; Tom, her lover, and Avice, her rival; she celebrates at the Berkeley grill with a dinner of steak, onions, and beer. Interestingly enough, her own son, Roger, also gains a similar but more meaningful triumph. At age seventeen, a student at Eton (where he had been enrolled a week after his birth) and a year away from Cambridge, he leaves school and goes off to Vienna in search of reality. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan; Viswanath.
278
THEN AND NOW
THEN AND NOW (1946). A novel, published in May in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday and Company, with an initial printing of 825,000 copies, and in London by *William Heinemann; published by Avon Books as Fools and Their Folly (1949); reprinted by Arno Press (1977) and by Pan Books (1979). Set in early sixteenth-century *Italy, the novel appears to be principally concerned with the politics and political negotiations of that time and in that part of the world, as seen through the rivalry between †Niccolo Machiavelli and †Caesar Borgia. Second, one can find parallels between the plots and events of 1502 and those during World War II. However, despite the presence of those larger, seemingly more important historical issues (and thus the meaning behind the title), *Maugham really focuses upon and develops (almost to extreme) the most primary of all human instincts: the search for sexual satisfaction. The novelist anchors his piece to the strategy of thirty-three-year-old Machiavelli to capture the heart and the bedroom of †Monna Aurelia Martelli, the beautiful and virginal third wife of the fat Imola alderman, †Bartolomeo Martelli, and twenty years younger than her husband. The well-laid plans of the cold calculator and master strategist fail at the crucial moment because Caesar Borgia, with uncanny instinct, suddenly demands an audience with Machiavelli concerning current and urgent military and diplomatic affairs. Thus, Machiavelli cannot keep his appointment with Aurelia. Machiavelli’s personal sexual tragedy transforms itself into a comedy when his page and nephew, eighteen-year-old †Piero Giacomini, captures the prize and eventually marries Aurelia. What does Machiavelli do about it all? Simply, as a creature of Maugham, not of history, he plans to write a play about his entire experience. While young Piero achieves a base sexual satisfaction, the mature Machiavelli finds consolation in a much higher form of art. If nothing else, he can return to Florence and to his wife, †Marietta—although the latter proves not a very appealing alternative to Aurelia Martelli. Although contemporary critics and literary scholars damned the work as meaningless and dull reading, they failed to comprehend that, at age seventy-two, Maugham still retained his powers to create interesting characters; and, above everything else, he had not lost his sense of humor. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Epstein; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan; Naik; Viswanath; Wilson.
THESIGER, ERNEST (1879–1961). A skeletal-looking British character actor on stage and in films, known for his creation of eccentric characters, Thesiger first walked upon a London stage in 1909. Possessed of a fine sense of the grotesque and a sharp wit, he became a master embroiderer. He also had a gift for female impersonation. Thesiger’s appearances included such film productions as West End Wives (1929), Horace Femm in The Old Dark House (1932), The Ghoul (1933), Heart Song (1934), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The
‘‘THE THREE FAT WOMEN OF THE ANTIBES’’
279
Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936), They Drive by Night (1938), Henry V (1944), Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), A Place of One’s Own (1946), The Ghosts of Berkeley Square (1947), Quartet (1948), Laughter in Paradise (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1952), Father Brown (1954), Make Me an Offer (1955), The Battle of the Sexes (1959), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961). Shortly following his stage triumph in 1923 as the Dauphin in *George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, Thesiger reportedly asked *Maugham why he had never written a part for him. Maugham replied that he indeed had but that Gladys Cooper (1888–1971) always played them. Thesiger did play the role of the pompous †Clive Champion-Cheney in *The Circle when it opened in London in 1921. Bibliography: Halliwell; Morgan.
‘‘THEY ALSO SERVE’’ (1942). An article that appeared in the November 1942 issue of This Week magazine. Far more important than its wartime propaganda substance, the piece illustrates *Maugham’s problems with his New York literary agent, *Jacques Chambrun. Chambrun sold the piece to Marie Meloney of This Week for $1,000; Chambrun then gave Maugham $625 and pocketed the remainder ($375) for a 37.5 percent commission. Bibliography: Morgan; Stott (1973).
‘‘THE THREE FAT WOMEN OF THE ANTIBES’’ (1933). A short story published initially in 1933 and included as the opening story in the collection *The Mixture As Before (1940). According to *Alexander Frere (1892–1984), *Maugham’s friend and literary executor, the actresses Denise Orme, Charlotte Ives, and Maxine Elliott (1868–1940)—all of them regular visitors to the *Villa Mauresque—served as the models for the three ladies who function as the title for the piece. In 1950 in New York, Maugham recorded the story for Columbia Records. In this piece, Maugham dwells upon the female’s hunger for romance, as well as for food. The widow †Beatrice Richman, the twice-divorced American †Arrow Sutcliffe, and the spinster †Frances Hickson (who prefers to be called ‘‘Frank’’) enjoy the pleasures of wealth and appetite. As close friends, ‘‘[i]t was their fat that brought them together and bridge that had cemented their alliance.’’ The single problem for the three focuses upon finding a proper fourth for the bridge table. Thus, at Frank’s suggestion, they invited †Lena Finch to spend some time with them on Antibes. Lena has just lost her husband and, with that trauma, considerable weight. Much to the consternation of the three fat ladies, who are undergoing yet another of their attempts to lose weight, Lena thrives on bread, butter, potatoes, and cream, while they are reduced to grilled fish, spinach, hard-boiled eggs, and raw tomatoes. Quite naturally, the three friends begin to bicker among themselves, particularly when Lena proceeds to win all of their money; they turn from one another and begin to confide in Lena. After
280
THREE FOR THE SHOW
Lena departs, the three then gorge themselves on hot rolls, cream, paˆte´ de foie gras, jam, fried potatoes, double dry Martinis, and chocolate eclairs. With the return of food, ‘‘[t]he misunderstandings of the last fortnight dissolved, and the sincere affection each had for the other welled up again in their hearts. They could hardly believe that they had ever contemplated the possibility of severing a friendship that had brought them so much solid satisfaction.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories II. The World Over; The Mixture As Before; Morgan; Pritchett.
THREE FOR THE SHOW (1955). See TOO MANY HUSBANDS. TODD, HENRY SOMERSET (1821–?). *Maugham’s great-uncle, son of his grandfather, Francis Todd. From him came the writer’s middle name, Somerset. The name itself derived from General Sir Henry Somerset (1794–1862), Henry Todd’s godfather, who, as a young man, fought with the duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War (1808–1814) and at Waterloo (18 June 1815). Bibliography: Robin Maugham (1966).
TOO MANY HUSBANDS (1919, 1940). The revised title of *Home and Beauty (1919) when it opened at the Booth Theatre, New York, on 8 October 1919. A motion picture based on Home and Beauty, produced by Columbia Pictures and starring Fred MacMurray (1908–1991) and Jean Arthur (1900–1991), appeared in 1940, remade in 1955 as *Three for the Show, produced by Columbia Pictures and starring Gower Champion (1919–1980) and Betty Grable (1916–1973). TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, HENRI MARIE RAYMOND DE (1864–1901). French painter and lithographer, born in Albi, France, to an aristocratic family. Physically frail, at age fourteen Lautrec broke both of his legs, which then ceased to grow. From 1882, he studied in Paris under Leon Joseph Florentin Bonnat (1833–1922) and Fernand Cormon (1845–1924) and in 1884 settled at Montmarte, where he painted and drew, both in pictures and on posters, the cabaret performers, prostitutes, barmaids, clowns, and actors representing the society there. From those subjects came such pictures as Jane Avril Leaving the Moulin Rouge (1892), The Bar (1898), Dolly the English Barmaid (1899), and At the Moulin Rouge (1892). Lautrec also depicted fashionable society—for instance, At the Races (1899)—and produced several portraits. Lautrec’s work reveals an unfailing but detached interest in the individuality of the human being behind his purely professional artistic eye. His alcoholism caused a complete breakdown, and in 1899 he entered a sanatorium. However, he recovered to resume his work and hectic life. Over 600 of his pictures hang in the Musee Lautrec at Albi. In New York in November 1950, *Maugham purchased (in his daughter’s name to avoid duties) Toulouse-Lautrec’s Le Raboteur, a picture of a naked man
‘‘THE TRAITOR’’
281
polishing a floor, for $10,000. At the Sotheby sale of Maugham’s paintings on 10 April 1962, Huntington Hartford, of the wealthy American family of grocers, purchased the piece for $75,600. Bibliography: Crystal; Morgan; Vinson.
TOWNE, CHARLES HANSON (1887–1949). *Maugham’s New York literary agent, whom he engaged in 1922. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Professor Paul A. and Mary Stuart Campbell Towne, he had been an editor of The Designer, The Smart Set, McClure’s Magazine, and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as poet, novelist, and newspaper columnist. Towne also authored a narrative, Loafing in Long Island (1922), and had risen to become an agent for those who wrote what he considered to be only the best fiction. Late in life (1940– 1941), Towne became an actor, starring in such roles as the Anglican clergyman in Life with Father. Maugham dismissed Towne in April 1927 for having signed him, without prior consultation, to a contract with *George H. Doran that ignored the writer’s demand of a guarantee of two and a half times the English sale. However, the two parted on amiable terms, Maugham considering Towne an arbitrary agent but a charming and amicable companion. Bibliography: Morgan; Who Was Who in America, 1943–1950.
‘‘THE TRAITOR’’ (1928). A short story, part of the *Ashenden sequence. An account of the trapping of a German spy, based on *Maugham’s initial World War I espionage assignment, when he went to Lucerne, *Switzerland, to investigate an Englishman who lived there with a German wife. For †Ashenden’s benefit, †R. identifies the reports of an agent, †Gustav Grabow, as models of the reports that he would expect from all of his agents. Gustav lives in Basle and represents a Swiss firm with branches in Frankfurt, Mannheim, and Cologne. Thus, he can travel up and down the Rhine and observe troop movements, munitions manufacturing, and the mind of the country. He wrote coded letters to his wife, who, in turn, forwarded them to R. However, something about Gustav’s operations bothers R., and he sends Ashenden to Basle to talk with Gustav’s wife. When Ashenden arrives, he unexpectedly finds Gustav at home rather than in *Germany as R. had supposed. Ashenden accuses him of falsifying reports, and events prove him correct. Nevertheless, he tells Gustave that he can, in the future, earn bonuses by providing the British with news that can be substantiated. Simply, Gustav will be paid only according to results, and his false reports will remain in the archives as models of that genre. Ashenden then assigns Gustav the task of determining the whereabouts of a German spy, an Englishman named †Grantley Caypor. The latter reports Caypor’s whereabouts to be Lucerne, and thus Ashenden moves on to that city. Lodging in a German hotel, he spies Caypor and his wife in the dining room. The forty-two-year-old Caypor, born in Birmingham, had been married to his
282
‘‘A TRAVELLER IN ROMANCE’’
German wife for eleven years. He alternated unsuccessful occupations between journalism and the shipping business, but principally served German intelligence. He had been responsible for the death of a British agent, a Spaniard named †Gomez, which disturbed R.; however, R., never one to allow revenge to stand in his way, determined that Caypor, a traitor to his country, might, nonetheless, prove useful to him if he could be persuaded to take more money from the British than from the Germans for betraying the latter. Thus, Ashenden’s mission is to determine if Caypor would work for the British. Matters become complicated with †Major von P., the head of German the Intelligence Service in Berne, growing anxious about the lack of activity from Caypor. R. believes that von P. wants Caypor back in England to spy from there. If Caypor refuses to spy for the British and indeed crosses back into England, then he can be shot as a spy. The reader and Ashenden later learn that R.’s real motive is, indeed, to lure Caypor back to England for capture and death. The intrigue begins when Ashenden (under the guise of *‘‘Somerville’’), with Caypor’s encouragement, engages †Mrs. Caypor to teach him conversational German, even though the woman detests him. As the relationship among the three (four, counting the Caypors’ dog, †Fritzi) unfolds, Ahsenden begins to regard Caypor with less repulsion and more curiosity. ‘‘Was Caypor a good man who loved evil or a bad man who loved good?’’ Finally, Caypor receives word from German intelligence that he must return to England, and Ashenden can recognize the fear in his eyes. In the end, Caypor leaves Switzerland for England, alone; he is captured, and he pays the penalty for his crime. Bibliography: Ashenden; Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Curtis (1974).
‘‘A TRAVELLER IN ROMANCE’’ (1909). A short story, first published in Printer’s Pie Annual. The †Narrator rides the post-chaise from St. Moritz to Chiavenna, Italy. Three fellow passengers (two †Men with business connections and a †Woman near fifty years of age) ride as far as Kampfer; there the Narrator is joined for the rest of the journey by a †Man, a Polish traveling merchant who works out of an office in Liverpool. The Pole looks upon his merchandise with disdain. When the day is done, he turns away from his work and seeks the past. ‘‘And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveller in Romance.’’ Bibliography: Whitehead.
TRAVELLER’S LIBRARY (1933). A single-volume (1,688 pages) anthology published in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday, Doran, and Company. Edited by *Maugham, who wrote a five-page introduction, the work consists of selections from novels, short stories, essays, and poems by fifty modern English writers. Doubleday reissued the work in the same year under the title Fifty Modern English Writers. Reissued again in 1986 by Norwood Editions and
TREE, SIR HERBERT DRAPER BEERBOHM
283
edited by Joseph Frederick Green as The Traveller’s Library Compiled with Notes. Bibliography: Stott (1973).
‘‘THE TREASURE’’ (1934, 1940). A short story published initially in 1934 and included in the collection *The Mixture As Before (1940). †Richard Harenger, in his twenties, separated from his wife, a civil servant with the Home Office, and a perfect gentleman, collects fine silver and hosts fine dinner parties to select guests in his London flat. In a moment of inexplicable weakness, he invites †Pritchard, his perfect parlormaid, to accompany him to the cinema; following that excursion, they go to bed—an event that Richard does not particularly enjoy. For her part, Pritchard, a widow and ten years older than Harenger, possesses the instincts of her class and station; she knows and appreciates their social differences, qualities that cannot be glossed over by money or even occasional bouts of passion. After the affair, they revert to their previous relationship of servant and master, and Harenger ends the story by being a very happy man. Richard Cordell calls the story ‘‘incredible’’ and ‘‘suitable for a smoking-car or locker-room yarn,’’ but it really represents, for Maugham, still another expression of his beliefs in the strict social conventions of Edwardian England. Reportedly, *Maugham had heard of an actual and similar instance, except that the maid had been a valet. One cannot help, of course, noting the close phonetic relationship between ‘‘Richard’’ and ‘‘Pritchard.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; The Mixture As Before; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Morgan.
TREE, SIR HERBERT DRAPER BEERBOHM (1853–1917). English romantic character actor and theater manager born in London, the second son of Julius Ewald Beerbohm and Constance Draper and the half brother of the writer and caricaturist *Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (1872–1956). After school in Kent and then a commercial education at Schnepfenthal College, Thuringia, Germany, he became an actor and eventually (1887) took charge of the Haymarket Theatre, London, where he managed to rival the Lyceum theater headed by Sir Henry Irving (1838–1905). In 1883, he married Helen Maud Holt (1864– 1937), a leading comic actress. By 1897, he had built and managed His Majesty’s Theatre, where he developed a mastery of stagecraft. In 1904, he founded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Ten years later, he scored a resounding success with the first production of *George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914). He took the name ‘‘Tree’’ from the literal translation of the word ‘‘baum’’ (or ‘‘bohm’’) in his last name. When *Maugham first met, in spring 1906, the one and supposedly only female love of his life, *Ethelwyn Sylvia (Sue) Jones, she had been acting with Tree’s Shakespeare company. Then, in 1912, at Tree’s request, Maugham wrote his adaptation of Molie`re’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (*The Perfect Gentle-
284
THE TREMBLING OF A LEAF: LITTLE STORIES OF THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDS
man), which Tree produced at His Majesty’s Theatre on 27 May 1913 and which ran for a disappointing eight performances. Bibliography: Behrman; DNB; Freedley and Reeves; Hartnoll; Morgan.
THE TREMBLING OF A LEAF: LITTLE STORIES OF THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDS (1921). A collection of stories published in Garden City, New York, by *George H. Doran, on 17 September, in an edition of 3,000 copies that sold for $1.90 each, and at London by *William Heinemann on 6 October; reprinted by Arno Press (1977); published as Sadie Thompson and Other Stories of the South Seas, Readers Library (1928); published as Rain, and Other Stories, New York: Grosset, 1932. In 1947, *Maugham gave the manuscript to his friend and financial adviser, *Bert Alanson. The title come from the question posed by the French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869), ‘‘L’extreme felicite a peine separee par une feuille tremblante de l’extreme desespoire, n’est-ce-pas la vie?’’ (Extreme happiness separated from extreme despair by a trembling leaf, is that not life?) The volume contains ‘‘Envoi,’’ *‘‘The Fall of Edward Barnard,’’ *‘‘Honolulu,’’ *‘‘Mackintosh,’’ *‘‘The Pacific,’’ *‘‘The Pool,’’ *‘‘Rain,’’ and *‘‘Red’’—all set in *Hawaii, * Samoa, and *Tahiti. Bibliography: Cordell; Curtis (1974); Dottin (1926); Morgan; Stott (1973).
TRIO (1951). A motion picture based on the short stories *‘‘The Verger’’ (1929), *‘‘The Sanatorium’’ (1938), and variations from *Ashenden (1928); produced by Paramount Studios and starring Jean Simmons (1929–) and Michael Rennie (1909–1971). A TRIP TO BRIGHTON (1911). A one-act comedietta, an adaptation of a play by Abel Tarride. It was produced by Sir Charles Wyndham (1837–1919) and starred his second wife, Mary Moore (1862–1931), at the New Theatre, London, in May 1911, at a charity matinee to benefit the City of London Hospital for Diseases of the Chest, but never published. Simply, the wife of a peer determines to emulate her husband when she discovers that he has been carrying on a flirtation with a friend. In 1957, when Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson called *Maugham’s attention to this piece, the writer denied any association with it. Bibliography: Curtis; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b).
TRIPPE AND COMPANY. A New York City brokerage firm with which *Maugham invested approximately $25,000 from his American play royalties. The firm failed in 1921, principally because the owner had misappropriated his clients’ stocks. Although Maugham managed to retrieve approximately 75 per-
TURNER, REGINALD
285
cent of his losses, from that time, he never trusted anyone with his money other than his American friend and investor, *Bert Alanson. Bibliography: Morgan.
TRITTON, ROBERT (?–1957). A London antique dealer, described as small, weak, and affable, who engaged in volunteer social work. In the spring of 1928, he hosted a stag party at his London flat, and there *Maugham met twenty-fouryear-old *Alan Searle, who would in 1944 succeed *Gerald Haxton as the writer’s secretary/companion. An occasional visitor to the *Villa Mauresque, Tritton later married tobacco heiress Elsie Baron. Bibliography: Morgan.
TROTTI, LAMAR (1900–1952). A Hollywood screenwriter and film producer who wrote the screenplay for *Maugham’s *The Razor’s Edge (1944), beginning in the fall of 1945. He had to rewrite the script twelve times before the studio, Twentieth-Century-Fox, would approve it. A prolific writer, Trotti worked on such films as In Old Chicago (1938), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Ox Bow Incident (1942), Wilson (1943), Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), Stars and Stripes Forever (1952), With a Song in My Heart (1952). Bibliography: Halliwell; Morgan.
TURKEY. Maugham and his secretary/companion *Alan Searle toured Greece and Turkey in April–May 1953, principally as a holiday after a period of illness—Maugham with his hernia surgery and Searle with his irritating skin infection. They spent most of the Turkish portion in Istanbul. Bibliography: Morgan.
TURNER, REGINALD (1869–1938). An English journalist, wit, and author of third-rate novels, Reggie Turner was reportedly the illegitimate son of Lionel Lawson (formerly Levy), Lord Burnham, whose older brother, Joseph Moses Levy, owned the London Daily Telegraph. After taking his degree at Oxford, he wrote a gossip column for the Telegraph, ‘‘London Day by Day.’’ He then became friendly with *Oscar Wilde, and after the latter’s release from Reading prison in 1897, Turner lived with him in exile in Dieppe; he remained with Wilde until the latter’s death in 1900. By 1907, he had become the drama critic for The Academy. All who knew him regarded Turner as the most engaging of companions and the most loyal of friends. He appears as ‘‘Algy’’ in *D. H. Lawrence’s novel Aaron’s Rod (1922). Turner also became *Sir Max Beerbohm’s closest friend, with whom he carried on a correspondence from 1892, when they met at Merton College, Oxford, until Turner’s death in December 1938. During 1901–1903, *Maugham, Turner, and Beerbohm were regular guests at Merton Abbey, eight miles from London, the home of *Christina Stewart Steevens. After 1907, Maugham and Turner
286
TYLER, GEORGE C.
became friends, and at this time, the former met *H. G. Wells, another regular visitor to Turner’s London flat. By 1909, spending most of his time in Italy, Turner became aware of Maugham’s growing recognition in the literary and theatrical worlds; envious, but never malicious, Turner could only claim that although he enjoyed Maugham’s company, he could not compare with Oscar Wilde. In 1926, Turner took it upon himself to arrange a meeting at Florence, Italy, between Maugham and D. H. Lawrence. Maugham saw Turner for the last time at Florence in April 1938. Turner, recovering from surgery for a cancerous growth on the tongue, appeared despondent because of his health and concern over the emergence of a fascist government in Italy. Together, they went to Montegufoni, a castle purchased by Sir George Sitwell in 1909 and where the poet Edith Sitwell was visiting her aged father. Turner died seven months later. Bibliography: Behrman; Hart-Davis; Morgan; Weintraub.
TYLER, GEORGE C. (fl. 1890–1935). American theatrical producer, born at Chillicothe, Ohio. Reportedly, he had made $1 million with the Broadway production of The Christian (1897), an adaptation of a novel by Thomas Henry Hall Caine (1853–1931). Tyler also brought the actress Eleonora Duse (1858– 1924) from Italy and the actress Beatrice Stella Tanner (Mrs. Patrick) Campbell (1865– 1940) from England to the United States, where they achieved immediate success. Tyler visited *Maugham in Paris in the spring of 1905 and paid him $1,000 for a one-year option on *Lady Frederick (1907). However, *Charles Frohman, not Tyler, produced the play on Broadway. According to both Tyler and Maugham, the American producer bought the thirty-one-year-old-Maugham his first two cocktails, thus initiating the writer’s habit, for the remainder of his long life, of a dry martini before lunch and another before dinner. More important, Tyler’s advance allowed Maugham to remain in Paris and then, during January–March 1906, journey to Greece and *Egypt. Bibliography: Curtis (1977); Hartnoll; Morgan.
U THE UNATTAINABLE: A FARCE IN THREE ACTS (1916, 1923). A comic play written in *Switzerland in 1915, the title of which *Maugham later changed to *Caroline: A Light Comedy in Three Acts. Produced on 8 February 1916, at the New Theatre, St. Martin’s Lane, London, running for 141 performances, produced by *Dion (Dot) Boucicault (1859–1929) and starring his wife, Irene Vanbrugh (1872–1949); produced on Broadway in the same year, running for 45 performances; revived at London in June 1926, extending for 152 performances, again starring Irene Vanbrugh; revived in 1949 for 32 performances; published by *William Heinemann at London in 1923. †Maude Fulton, a forty-year-old spinster, and †Isabella Trench, a plump and pretty thirty-five-year-old with a husband tucked safely away in *India, prove quick to console †Caroline Ashley when they read, in the Times, of the death of Caroline’s husband, †Stephen Ashley. At age forty-one, Stephen had been in the Edward and Alexandra Hospital, Nairobi, suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. He and Caroline had been separated for the past ten years. At age thirtyfive, the still attractive Caroline has been in love with †Robert Oldham since her separation, but she does not want to remarry. Oldham, a forty-five-year-old solicitor, although in love with Caroline, appears similarly inclined to remain unmarried. The plot of the piece develops with Maude and Isabella’s attempting to promote the marriage of Robert and Caroline, while fending off the advances of †Rex Cunningham, a young man with a romantic look who is in love with Caroline. The marriage project appears doomed: Oldham proposes, Caroline refuses, and both are relieved. Simply, the two want to remain in love with each other without having to surrender their freedom. Caroline’s physician, †Dr. Cornish, arrives to examine Caroline, and he tells his patient that she suffers from middle age. The diagnosis disturbs Caroline to
288
‘‘THE UNCONQUERED’’
such an extent that she summons Cunningham, hoping to find relief from his youth and passion. However, she discovers that the romantic Rex enjoys only suffering and really wants nothing to do with marriage. Isabella and Maude then rush Oldham back into the breech, telling him that by refusing to marry Caroline, he has created a tragedy. Caroline and Oldham weaken and agree to marry, then quarrel about in whose house they will live. To ease the strain, they decide to invite Rex and Isabella for a game of bridge. In the end, Caroline decides to abandon Rex and Oldham for Dr. Cornish, who, following the first wave of shock and objection, agrees to marry her. Then, after abruptly announcing that Stephen Ashley is still alive, he quickly retreats from the stage, leaving the principals in the triangle totally happy. Rex continues to suffer; Oldham looks forward to marrying Caroline; Caroline remains unattainable. Originally, the last act included the actual return of Stephen Ashley; however, after an initial viewing, Maugham did not like what he saw. Within twenty-four hours, he rewrote the final scene and eliminated Stephen. Bibliography: Collected Plays. II.; Barnes; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan; Stott (1973).
‘‘THE UNCONQUERED’’ (1943). A short story, initially published in Collier’s Magazine in 1943 and included in the collection *Creatures of Circumstance (1947). This proved to be *Maugham’s only story set in World War II. Two German soldiers, †Hans and †Willie, having lost their way, come to a French farmhouse near Soissons. They force their way in and drink wine, and Hans rapes the daughter, †Annette Perrier. Three months later, Hans returns and finds Annette pregnant. A teacher and formerly a governess to two little girls at Stuttgart, Annette despises Hans for what he has done to her. For his part, Hans, the son of a wealthy farmer from Bavaria who had been to school in Munich and then to agricultural college, wants to provide for Annette and their child; however, she will have no part of him. Annette’s parents actually take a liking to Hans, principally because he brings them tobacco, food, and clothing; †Madame Perrier even calls him ‘‘Jean.’’ Hans then claims that he actually loves Annette and that, after the war, he will stay at Soissons rather than return to *Germany. Although that impresses her parents, since they envision a man at work on their farm (their only son having been killed in the war), Annette continues to want nothing to do with him. Actually, she remains in love with, and engaged to, †Pierre Gavin, a teacher, currently confined and starving in a military prison in Germany. He eventually dies there. Following the birth of her baby, a boy who closely resembles his father, Annette, in a final act of defiance against Hans, drowns the child. Bibliography: Collected Short Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance; Stott (1973).
THE UNKNOWN. A PLAY IN THREE ACTS (1920). Produced at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on 9 August 1920, starring Basil Rathbone (1892–1967)
UNWIN, THOMAS FISHER
289
and Haidee Wright (1868–1940?) and running for seventy-seven performances. Published in London by *William Heinemann (1920) and in Garden City, New York, by *George H. Doran (1920). The piece actually proves a recycling of *Maugham’s 1901 novel *The Hero; in the play, he simply shifts the background forward, from the Boer War to World War I. Thus, the reader finds little difference in †James Parsons, his parents †Richmond and †Frances Parsons, and his fiance´, †Mary Clibborn and their 1920 transformations. The son of †Colonel George and †Evelyn Wharton, †Major John Wharton returns to Stour, Kent, from the battlefields of World War I for three weeks to recuperate from his wounds. He has served in India and Gallipoli, having received the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order. His thin and frail father, a veteran of *India, *Egypt, and South Africa, suffers from a severe illness and will not live much longer. For seven years, John has been engaged to †Sylvia Bullough (as had *Jamie Parsons been engaged to †Mary Clibborn for five years), who has spent most of her time during the war tending to her bedridden mother. Although pleasant-looking, Sylvia realizes that she is no longer young. The thesis of the piece comes forth when John discusses the death of his clever and amusing friend †Robbie Harrison, who had been killed in battle. That tragic occurrence proves the final stage for John’s transformation from Christianity to atheism; he has lost all faith in God. The practical, competent, and sensible Sylvia turns out to be somewhat of a religious bigot, and she decides not to marry John. The debate goes forward on a lower scale when Maugham contrasts beliefs and views of subordinate actors. Thus, the widowed †Charlotte Littlewood, Evelyn Wharton’s friend for thirty years, wants to leave Stour and move to London. Her older son, †Archie, badly wounded on the Somme, eventually dies; her younger son, nineteen-year-old †Ned, is killed on the field at Boulogne. Charlotte refuses to mourn for them, for she can find no reason to come before God and ask forgiveness. Indeed, she questions who will forgive God. To argue for Christianity, Maugham simply calls upon the conventional stereotypes of the Church, †Reverend Norman Poole, vicar of Stour, and his wife †Dorothy. Middle-aged, dour, brisk, competent, and firm, Dorothy appears as a somewhat older version of Sylvia Bullough, while her husband, with energy, breeze, and cheer, upholds the supreme power of God over all matters on earth. No place exists in his mind or in his world for such freethinkers as John Wharton. At the end of the play, George Wharton dies peacefully, but Sylvia conceals his death from John and tricks him into taking Holy Communion. Bibliography: Collected Plays. III. Cordell; Curtis (1974); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b).
UNWIN, THOMAS FISHER (1848–1935). Son of a printer and the founder of the London firm that bore his name until 1914, when, under his nephew
290
UP AT THE VILLA
Stanley Unwin (1884–1968), it became George Allen and Unwin. Described as tall, bearded, nervous, and innovative, Unwin published early works by Joseph Conrad, *John Galsworthy, William Butler Yeats, and Ford Madox Ford. Known to his employees as ‘‘Fishy Onions,’’ Unwin drove hard bargains with his authors and occupied as much space of the printed page as he could. Little wonder, then, that although Unwin did encourage young writers (perhaps because he could get them cheaply), they tended to leave him quite early in their careers. Unwin initiated such sequences as the Independent Novel Series, the Mermaid Series, the Story of the Nation Series, and the Pseudonym Library— the last intended to challenge readers to identify the names of the authors. Before 1900, he had begun to publish cheap novels that sold for six shillings. In 1896, the twenty-two-year-old *Maugham, a fourth-year medical student at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London sent to Unwin his first two stories, *‘‘A Bad Example’’ and *‘‘Daisy,’’ both of which the publisher rejected. In January 1897, he sent Unwin a manuscript of a novel entitled ‘‘A Lambeth Idyll,’’ which the publisher accepted in April of that year under the title *Liza of Lambeth. The terms specified no advance, no royalties on the first 750 copies, 10 percent royalty up to 2,000 copies, 12.5 percent up to 4,000 copies, 15 percent up to 6,000, and 20 percent after that. Maugham would receive six author’s copies, and Unwin held an option on the writer’s next two books. Unwin tried to sell the American rights to Liza of Lambeth to Charles Scribner, but the latter wanted no part of it. By the end of 1897, Maugham had a second novel for Unwin, *The Making of a Saint (1898), for which the writer received an advance of fifty pounds upon publication. Unwin this time managed to sell the piece to an American publisher, L. C. Page, who published it in May 1898. Finally, in June 1899, Unwin published Maugham’s collection of short stories *Orientations, which included the two pieces that he had rejected in 1896. Later in that same year, the writer sent to Unwin ‘‘The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey,’’ the distant predecessor to *Of Human Bondage (1915), but the publisher refused it. By the time Maugham stood ready to publish his fourth book and third novel, *The Hero (1901), he had determined to sever relations with T. Fisher Unwin, principally because he believed that the publisher had taken financial advantage of him, particularly with Liza of Lambeth. By that time, Maugham had a literary agent, *William Maurice Colles, an arrangement that irritated Unwin. Thus, at the end of the contract for the three books, both writer and publisher were indeed pleased to rid themselves of each other. Bibliography: Curtis (1977); Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan; Stott (1973); Who Was Who, 1929–1940.
UP AT THE VILLA (1940, 1941). A novel, appearing originally and serially in Redbook Magazine from February through April 1941 under the title ‘‘The Villa on the Hill.’’ Published in 1941 in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday,
UP AT THE VILLA
291
Doran, and Company, and in that same year at London by *William Heinemann; reprinted by Arno Press (1977) and Penguin Books (1978); recorded, with *Cakes and Ale, for Books on Tape (1980). Warner Brothers Studio purchased the film rights for $30,000 and assigned *Christopher Isherwood to write the screenplay; however, the studio could not satisfy the censors, and Isherwood really had no appetite for the project. In November 1960, the manuscript of the novel sold for nearly £1,200 at an auction for the benefit of the London Library. †Mary Panton, an attractive widow and former actress, age thirty, has leased a Florentine villa from the Leonards, who had purchased it from the impoverished descendants of a noble Florentine. †Matthew Panton, a gambler and drunkard who had squandered his fortune, had died a year ago in an automobile accident. Mary thus has no intention of ever again hazarding the risks of wedlock. With that in mind, she attends a dinner party at Florence hosted by the †Princess San Ferdinando, an old American tyrant who had lived in Italy for the past forty years and whose husband had been dead for a quarter of a century. She goes in company with the seemingly safe fifty-four-year-old †Sir Edgar Swift, of the Indian Civil Service, a governor of the northwest provinces and a contemporary of Mary’s father. Swift has been in love with Mary. Mary has attracted the attention of †Karl Richter, an Austrian violinist at a Florentine restaurant on the banks of the river Arno. As a foreshadow of events, Karl’s father, †Herr Richter, had been head of the police in a small Austrian town during the regime (1934) of Chancellor Englebert Dollfuss (1892–1934). Favoring the restoration of the Archduke Otto, the elder Richter shot himself when the Germans marched into Austria. At any rate, Karl, an art history student at the university who plans to become a schoolmaster, admits to being a terrible violinist. Mary attracts his attention and feels sorry for him when she learns that he had spent three months in a concentration camp before escaping into the Austrian Tyrol. Karl and Mary have an affair, but when she proposes to bring their affair to an end, he shoots himself. Mary must dispose of the body, and thus †Rowley Flint enters upon the scene. The disreputable Flint (supposedly modeled after Maugham’s often disreputable secretary/companion, *Gerald Haxton), just over thirty years of age, has been married at least twice: the first marriage, at age twenty-three, lasted three years; he left the second wife two or three years after their marriage. A cousin of †Lady Grace Trail, Flint has inherited an income. Although shifty and with an air of dissipation, Flint proves sexually appealing, and he indeed focuses a shifty eye upon Mary Panton. Therefore, he proves more than willing to help her dispose of Karl Richter’s body. Once that task has been completed, Rowley simply blackmails Mary Panton into marrying him. *Maugham himself described the piece as ‘‘a little story to pass an idle hour’’ and admitted to having done it only for the money. His detractors agreed, complaining that Up at the Villa represented a waste of Maugham’s talents and his readers’ time.
292
UTRILLO, MAURICE
Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974); Morgan; Stott (1973); Zabel.
UTRILLO, MAURICE (1993–1955). French painter born in the Montmarte section of Paris, the illegitimate son of Suzanne Valadon (1869–1938)—a painter of nudes, portraits, and figures. Adopted by the Spanish writer Miguel Utrillo, the young man began to paint at Montmagny in 1902. Despite his acute alcoholism and residences in various nursing homes, Utrillo proved a prolific artist, producing picture-postcard views of the streets of Paris, particularly of old Montmarte. His ‘‘White Period’’ paintings of 1908–1914 became sought after for their subtle coloring and sensitive feeling for atmosphere. He signed his work ‘‘Maurice Utrillo V,’’ incorporating the initial of his mother’s family name. At New York in February 1949, *Maugham purchased from the gallery of Paul Rosenberg Utrillo’s Une Rue au Conquent for $4,500, placing it in the name of his daughter, *Lady John (Liza) Hope. Bibliography: Morgan; Vinson.
V THE VAGRANT MOOD. SIX ESSAYS (1952). Published in London by *William Heinemann (1952) and in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday Doran and Company (1953) and reprinted by Kennikat Press (1969 and Arno Press (1977). The volume sold 40,000 copies in England alone. *Maugham’s prefatory note informs us: ‘‘Three of the essays in this volume appeared in The Cornhill. One [‘‘Reflections on a Certain Book’’] was delivered as a lecture [entitled *‘‘Beauty and the Professor’’] at the Philosophical Colloquium of Columbia [University, 2 November 1950], but I have rewritten it in the hope of making it more easily readable. Part of the final essay [*‘‘Some Novelists I Have Known’’] appeared many years ago in Life and Letters.’’ The essays themselves bear the titles ‘‘Augustus,’’ concerning the English topographical writer Augustus John Cuthbert Hare (1834–1903); ‘‘Zurbaran,’’ on the Spanish religious painter Francisco Zurbaran (1598–1662); ‘‘The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story’’; ‘‘After Reading Burke,’’ wherein Maugham seeks to uncover the justification of the praise extended upon the philosopher/ politician Edmund Burke (1729–1797) by the early nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830); ‘‘Reflections on a Certain Book,’’ on the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790) of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and the German philosopher’s aesthetic ideas; and ‘‘Some Novelists I Have Known,’’ in which Maugham discusses *Henry James (1843–1916), *H. G. Wells (1966–1946), *Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), Lady Elizabeth Russell (1866–1941, as she was known when Maugham knew her), and *Edith Wharton (1862–1937). Bibliography: Cordell; Curtis (1974); Stott (1973).
294
VANBRUGH, IRENE
VANBRUGH, IRENE (1872–1949). English actress, daughter of the Reverend Prebendary Reginald Barnes of Exeter and the sister of the distinguished actress Violet Augusta Mary Vanbrugh (1867–1942). Trained by Sarah Thorne (1837– 1899), the actress and manager of the Theatre Royal, Margate, London, Irene Vanbrugh debuted at the Theatre Royal in 1888 as Phoebe in As You Like It, as well as at the old Globe Theatre as the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland. From 1893 through 1941, she performed leading roles at the Haymarket, the Globe, the Duke of York’s Theatre, and His Majesty’s Theatre in such pieces as Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) and *Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and in a variety of parts in plays by James Barrie. She married the actor/director *Dionysius (Dot) George Boucicault (1859–1929). In 1938, Vanbrugh celebrated her golden jubilee with a matinee at His Majesty’s Theatre, London, and in 1941 she received the honor of Dame of the British Empire. With her dark and exquisitely expressive eyes complementing her overall charm, Irene Vanbrugh reportedly represented the highest level of acting of her generation. In October 1909, Vanbrugh replaced *Marie Lohr (1890–1975) in the title role of *Maugham’s *Smith (1909), which had opened a month earlier, and the following year starred in *Grace (1910). She gave an admirable performance as †Norah Marsh in *The Land of Promise (1914) and, under the direction of her husband, played the title role in *Caroline (1916). She repeated that role ten years later in a 1926 revival of that play. With at least six other leading actresses of her generation, Irene Vanbrugh was a piece of the mosaic of †Julia Lambert Gosselyn in Maugham’s 1937 novel *Theatre. Bibliography: Freedley and Reeves; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
VAN VECHTEN, CARL (1880–1964). American critic, novelist, essayist, and photographer. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and graduate of the University of Chicago in 1903, Van Vechten became assistant music critic for the New York Times and then drama critic for the New York Press, eventually publishing collections of those articles in Red (1925) and Excavations (1926). After 1920, he turned away from critical journalism to fiction that described the decadence of the 1920s: beginning with a pseudobiographical novel, Peter Whiffle (1922), and following with The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), Firecrackers (1925), Spider Boy (1928), and Parties (1930). Following the publication of Sacred and Profane Memories (1932), Van Vechten put away his pen and occupied himself with photography, while also devoting time to editions (1951) of posthumous works by Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) housed at Yale University Library. In addition to writing and photography, Van Vechten demonstrated an interest in jazz, especially that genre played at Harlem nightclubs, and his West Fifty-fifth Street apartment, near the Gotham Hotel, became known as the midtown branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
‘‘THE VERGER’’
295
*Maugham met Van Vechten in New York in late September 1924, and the New York writer led him and *Gerald Haxton on a long round of parties before they departed for New Orleans and then on to *Mexico. Returning to New York in October 1926, Maugham and Haxton benefited from a Van Vechten-guided tour of a Harlem house of joy. When Van Vechten, whom Maugham called ‘‘Carlo,’’ came to the *Villa Mauresque in August 1934, he took his host’s photograph. Obviously, the two saw much of, and corresponded with, each other during the years of World War II, when Maugham resided in the United States (October 1940–May 1946) and divided his time among the Doubleday estate in South Carolina, New York, and *Hollywood. Bibliography: Crystal; Hart; Morgan.
THE VENTURE. AN ANNUAL OF ART AND LITERATURE. A London literary periodical edited by Maugham and the writer/artist Laurence Housman (1865–1959) and printed by James Baillie. A highly sophisticated journal and one expensive to produce, Venture sold for five shillings and housed art as well as literary pieces. It endured for only two numbers, the first in the fall of 1903 and the second in early 1905 (for 1904). *Maugham’s play *Marriages Are Made in Heaven appeared there (1903), as did poems and prose works by A. E. Housman (1859–1936), *Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), John Masefield (1878–1967), Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), *E. F. Benson (1867–1940), Francis Thompson (1859–1907), Richard Garnett (1835–1906), *Edmund Gosse (1849–1928), Alfred Noyes (1880–1959), Arthur Symons (1865–1945), and James Joyce (1882–1941) and a one-act play by *Violet Hunt (1866–1942) and illustrations by Lucien Pissarro (1866–1944) and Laurence Housman—none of whom received payment for their contributions. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1974, 1977); Morgan; Stott (1973).
‘‘THE VERGER’’ (1929, 1936). A short story, published initially in 1929 and included in the collection *Cosmopolitans (1936). Also included with *‘‘Mr. Know-All’’ and *‘‘Sanatorium’’ as part of the Paramount Studio film *Trio (1951), starring Jean Simmons (1929–) and Michael Rennie (1909–1971). In 1951, a Romanian writer of fiction who had settled in the United States, Konrad Bercovici (1882–1961), filed a plagiarism suit against *Maugham, claiming that ‘‘The Verger’’ came directly from his own story ‘‘It Pays To Be Ignorant.’’ Maugham responded that he heard the story, a well-known piece of Jewish folklore, from his surgeon friend *Dr. Ivor Back. Apparently, Bercovici’s suit came to no end. †Albert Edward Foreman has been the verger (or caretaker) of the fashionable St. Peter’s Church, Neville Square, London, for the past sixteen years. Tall, slim, grave, and generally dignified, he had spent practically his entire working life in service in very good houses—as page boy, footman, single-handed butler, and butler with two men under him. Despite those qualities and qualifications,
296
‘‘THE VESSEL OF WRATH’’
Albert Edward can neither read nor write, a fact discovered by the †Vicar and two †Churchwardens. The three tell Albert Edward that they will give him three months to learn to read and write; otherwise, he will have to leave the church. Determining that he is too old a dog to learn new tricks, the verger responds that he will resign as soon as a replacement can be found. On his way home and in search of a shop where he can buy a package of cigarettes, Foreman discovers that the street, with all of its shops, houses no place where one can purchase cigarettes. A month after he leaves St. Peter’s, he establishes a business as tobacconist and news agent. In the course of ten years, he had acquired no less than ten shops and was earning more money than he knew what to do with. His bank account amounts to £30,000, and his †Bank Manager advises that he invest it. Albert Edward still cannot read or write— although his business transactions have forced him to learn to write his name— and the Bank Manager cannot believe that he has amassed so much money without being able to do so. ‘‘ ‘Good God, man, what would you be now if you had been able to do so?’ ‘I can tell you that sir,’ said Mr. Foreman, a little smile on his still aristocratic features. ‘I’d be verger of St. Peter’s, Neville Square.’ ’’ Bibliography: Collected Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans; Hart; Morgan.
‘‘THE VESSEL OF WRATH’’ (1931). A short story, included in the collection *Ah King. Charles Laughton (1899–1962) and Elsa Lanchester (1902–1986) starred in the 1938 film version, *The Beachcomber, produced by Paramount Studios. In this piece, *Maugham simply reversed the premise set down in *‘‘Rain,’’ as well as the sexes of his principal characters. †Martha Jones, well over forty years of age, a missionary and spinster endowed with ruthless optimism, teaches in the Baptist mission school at Baru on the Alas Islands and helps her narrowminded and dogmatic brother, †Owen Jones, with his medical work. The Dutch controleur of the islands, †Mynheer Evart Gruyter, a fat and jovial fellow, never misses the opportunity to antagonize Rev. Jones or to lose ‘‘his capacity of extracting amusement from the Rev. Owen’s dour struggle with the infirmities of human nature.’’ The only other white man on Baru happens to be †Ginger Ted, a fat, thirtyone-year-old drunk. Owen Jones wants Gruyter to deport him, but the controleur insists that the cleric resort to the efforts of his calling and try to reform the man. Besides, Ted proves to be Gruyter’s occasional drinking partner, and the administrator has a liking for the fellow. He instead sentences Ted to hard labor on the islands, and, through a series of events relative to Martha’s assisting her brother with his medical work, she and Ted come together on a boat and find themselves marooned on one of the islands. In the end, Martha Jones reforms and marries Ginger Ted. Ignoring her basic sexual instincts and reactions, she
‘‘THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE’’
297
convinces herself that her concern for him focuses only upon his spiritual rehabilitation. The entire affair is too much of a shock for Gruyter, who exclaims to Rev. Jones, ‘‘ ‘Have you told her the risks she’s running? I mean, bringing sinners to repentance and all that sort of thing’s all right, but there are limits.’ ’’ Bibliography: Ah King; Complete Short Stories. I. East and West; Cordell.
‘‘VIRTUE’’ (1931). A short story, included in the collection *Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular. †Margery Hobson Bishop, a middle-aged woman, attractive and ten years younger than her adoring fifty-five-year-old husband, †Charlie Bishop, develops an attraction for a younger man, twentyeight-year-old †Gerald Morton. Charlie appears pleased at the relationship, for he sincerely believes that now his wife of sixteen years has someone with whom she can, in all innocence, play. At age twenty-eight and a bachelor, Morton is a district officer in *Borneo who has an obsession with the building of a road. Margery leaves Charlie because she believes that it is the only honest action that she can possibly take. Charlie Bishop, a pathologist, and the †Narrator had been medical students together; ironically, the Narrator had introduced Morton to the Bishops. Upon learning that Margery has actually left him, Charlie kills himself, and after that Morton, the lover, expresses his condolences and abruptly leaves Margery. The theme of the piece, as *Maugham clearly develops it, underscores his belief that virtue, if carried to extreme, produces only disaster and tragedy. Margery could have had her affair with Morton, and her husband would never have been the wiser. Indeed, after her passion had run its course, she would have returned to him, and at least he would have remained alive. As Narrator, Maugham has told us at the outset of his story that ‘‘sometimes even the fate of human beings is curious to consider.’’ At the end, that same Narrator concludes, ‘‘ ‘If it’s cynical to look truth in the face and exercise common sense in the affairs of life, then certainly I’m a cynic.’ ’’ Bibliography: Collected Short Stories. I. East and West; First Person Singular; Calder (1972/1973); Cordell.
‘‘THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE’’ (1935). A short story, included in the collection *The Mixture As Before. A twenty-two-year-old writer, †Peter Melrose, receives an invitation to the house of the †Narrator, himself a writer, at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, to meet a Riviera neighbor of his, the prima donna †La Falterona. The Narrator does not really like his younger counterpart. Melrose seeks material about a prima donna for his next book, and thus his host provides him with a real and tangible model. Ironically, Melrose has imagined practically every aspect of La Falterona before he even sees her, and the meeting simply confirms the preconceived workings of his artistic imagination. La Falterona, who claims to be Hungarian (although her accent suggests that she comes from Kansas City), no longer sings opera, but she remains on the tour. Indeed, when La Falterona reads the novel, she immediately recognizes herself.
298
‘‘THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE’’
Two points of view about art and life emerge from the piece. According to Peter Melrose: ‘‘The passion for art. The disinterestedness. She has that same nobility of soul that I saw in my mind’s eye. The small-minded, the curious, the vulgar put every obstacle in her way and she sweeps them all aside by the greatness of her purpose and the purity of her ends. . . . Isn’t it wonderful how nature copies art? I swear to you, I’ve got her to the life.’’
However, for the Narrator (Maugham): What a strange woman! I thought then that I would sooner have her as she was, with her monstrous faults, than as Peter Melrose saw her, a pattern of all the virtues. But then people blame me because I rather like people who are a little worse than is reasonable. She was hateful, of course, but she was irresistible. Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; The Mixture As Before; Curtis (1974).
W WALLER, LEWIS [WILLIAM WALLER LEWIS] (1860–1915). English romantic actor and stage manager. Born in *Spain of English parents, Waller dabbled in amateur theater, then turned professional in 1883 at Toole Theater, King William’s Street, Charing Cross, London. He became the first of the socalled matinee idols, demonstrating his best talents in Shakespeare and eighteenth-century French romance, particularly when he could take advantage of the power of his voice. His most fervent fans wore KOW badges (‘‘Keen on Waller’’). In 1885, Waller expanded his career to include management, most notably at the Haymarket Theatre, London. He married actress Florence West (1862–1913). Waller produced *Maugham’s play *The Explorer in June 1908 at the Lyric Theatre, London, starring as †Alec Mackenzie, and then presented a revised version in May 1909. Neither run proved dramatically or financially successful. Waller irritated Maugham by rewriting the last act of the 1909 version, but the play closed before the playwright, then in Italy, could get back to London to do anything about it. Bibliography: Behrmann; Hartnoll; Mander and Mitchenson (1955a, 1955b); Morgan.
WALLINGER, SIR JOHN ARNOLD (1872–1931). A career policeman and intelligence officer, son of W.H.A. Wallinger, who had served with the Indian Forest Service. The younger Wallinger entered the Imperial Indian Police in 1896 and then (1896–1909) served in various districts of Bombay. In 1904, Wallinger returned briefly to England and served with Scotland Yard, after which he alternated between police agencies in England and *India. He received an appointment with the British Foreign Service, remaining there from 1910
300
WALPOLE, SIR HUGH SEYMOUR
until 1926. After duties on the Imperial General Staff, Wallinger took charge of British intelligence in *France and *Switzerland during World War I. He accepted the appointment to his last post, deputy inspector-general of police, in 1919, from which he retired in 1926. Wallinger knew *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome and, indeed, carried on a romantic affair with one of her friends. Through Syrie’s assistance, he had contacted *Maugham sometime in 1915, suggesting that the writer’s knowledge of French and German would prove valuable in the intelligence business. By late September, Maugham had left the Red Cross and joined Wallinger’s service. In the *Ashenden (1928) stories, Maugham transformed Wallinger into his title character’s superior, †Colonel R. Bibliography: Morgan; Who Was Who, 1929–1940.
WALPOLE, SIR HUGH SEYMOUR (1884–1941). English popular novelist, born in Auckland, New Zealand. Walpole came to England at age five, attended King’s School, Canterbury, and Durham Grammar School, then went on to take a degree (1906) from Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His father, the Reverend G.H.S. Walpole, had taught theology in New York and eventually became bishop of Edinburgh. Before devoting his time to writing, he spent some years as a schoolmaster at Epsom and saw service in World War I—twice as a war correspondent and then with the Red Cross attached to the Russian Ninth Army. Beginning in 1924, he resided principally in Cumberland. Of his major novels, Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (1911) concern schoolmasters, The Dark Forest (1916) focuses upon Walpole’s wartime experiences, Jeremy (1919) initiates a series of novels about a young boy, and the Herries Chronicle—Rogue Herries (1930), Judith Paris (1931), The Fortress (1932), and Vanessa (1933)—constitute a historical sequence set in Cumberland. His consistent popularity came from his straightforward style, clear and powerful description, and the ability to create a dominating atmosphere in which his characters could function and act their parts. Walpole’s 1919 novel, The Secret City, received the James Tate Black Memorial Prize, while his 1922 effort, The Cathedral, proved his favorite piece. During the 1930s Walpole wrote weekly critical articles for the Daily Express of London. The writer achieved knighthood in 1937. A known *homosexual who never married, Walpole had affairs with the Danish tenor-baritone Lauritz Melchior (1890–1973) and a constable from Cornwall by the name of Harold Cheevers, who subsequently became his chauffeur, secretary, and companion. *Maugham and Walpole met in the summer of 1910 at a garden party at Camden hosted by *Violet Hunt, and the two developed a friendly, although not an enthusiastic, relationship. The novelists even managed occasional correspondence in praise of each other’s work but clearly each looked upon the other as a rival. With the publication of *Cakes and Ale in 1930, the connection between Maugham and Hugh Walpole achieved a status that kept literary critics
‘‘THE WASH-TUB’’
301
and scholars busy for at least two decades. In the character of †Alroy Kear, laid out graphically in the opening chapter, Maugham created a novelist, the author of thirty books, who had gained a considerable position in the literary world on little talent. Educated at Winchester School and New College, Oxford, Kear tutored the delicate son of a very noble lord but resigned that position to devote himself totally to literature. He had even managed to lecture at the University of Virginia. ‘‘He was an example of what an author can do, and to what heights he can rise, by industry, commonsense, honesty and the efficient combination of means and ends.’’ With assistance from †Edward Driffield’s second wife, Kear will write a dishonest but commercially successful biography of Driffield. Clearly, anyone associated with the London literary scene of the 1920s could recognize Hugh Walpole in Alroy Kear; indeed, Walpole himself may have been the first one to have done so, since he served as chair of the Book Society selection committee and read the galleys of the novel. Then came letters of accusation, protest, and denial that approached the level of scandal. Maugham later apologized slightly in his introduction to the 1950 Modern Library edition of Cakes and Ale but at the same time concluded that although he never wished to hurt Walpole, the latter proved easy to like but difficult to respect. Walpole initiated one or two feeble attempts at revenge, for example, the fictional novelist Somerset Balls in his Captain Nicholas: A Modern Comedy (1934) and the pessimistic writer Archie Bertrand in John Cornelius: His Life and Adventures 1937), but no one paid any attention. In the end, Maugham won the game, simply because the controversy helped to improve sales. For his part, Walpole continued to chirp away at Maugham from the pages of newspapers and periodical reviews. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; Curtis (1974, 1977); DNB; Drabble; Robin Maugham (1978, 1966); Morgan.
‘‘THE WASH-TUB’’ (1919, 1936). A short story, published initially in 1919 and included in the 1936 collection *Cosmopolitans. The †Narrator comes to Positano, *Italy, from Capri. At the hotel, the waiter, †Giuseppi, tells him of an American painter by the name of †Barnaby, who has been staying in the town for the past three months. Naturally and eventually, the two meet, and their dinner conversation focuses upon another American, a †Mrs. Barnaby, who came to London for the social season and became a great celebrity by telling stories about her husband at dinner parties. She claimed that in Arizona, her husband, known as †One-Bullet Mike Barnaby, has engaged in cowpunching, goldmining, gunrunning, ‘‘and God knows what in his day.’’ Further, she maintained that she had stood by her husband’s side, even washing miners’ clothes and cooking for the entire mining camp. Mrs. Barnaby literally ‘‘swam into London Society in her wash-tub.’’ As the Narrator quickly discovers, the Barnaby in Positano and One-Bullet Mike are one and the same. In reality, Barnaby is a doctor, and he and his wife had lived quietly in Pennsylvania for the past
302
WATT, ALEXANDER POLLOCK
thirty years. Mrs. Barnaby’s cousin died, left her a considerable sum of money, and she fulfilled a lifelong desire by going to London, entertaining, and doing everything about which she had read in books. So as not to betray his wife and destroy the realization of her fantasy, Dr. Barnaby concludes that he ‘‘must continue to disappear.’’ Bibliography: Complete Short Stories. II. The World Over; Cosmopolitans.
WATT, ALEXANDER POLLOCK (1834–1914). Reportedly the founder of the profession of literary agent, Watt rose to become the most reputable among his colleagues. A Scot, Watt occupied an office, beginning in 1893, at No. 2 Paternoster Square, London, and represented his clients for a fee of 10 percent. His writers included Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925), *Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), Francis Bret Harte (1836–1902), and *Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). By 1896, he had prepared a promotional brochure with testimonials from authors who had been spared the humiliating process of negotiating with publishers. He moved his office to a more fashionable location in the Strand and even employed a uniformed retired sergeant to take visitors’ cards. When he retired, he left the business, Alexander Watt and Company, to his three sons. Although *Maugham did not consult Watt initially, he enjoyed a longtime relationship with A. P. Watt and with Alexander Watt and Company. The firm still represented him in London as late as 1954, when the writer celebrated his eightieth birthday. Bibliography: Drabble; Hepburn; Morgan.
WAUGH, ALEXANDER (ALEC) RABAN (1898–1981). English novelist and travel writer, born in London, the son of *Arthur Waugh and the older brother of *Evelyn Waugh. Waugh received his formal education first at Sherborne School, Dorset—which formed the subject of his initial novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), wherein he considered the delicate issue of *homosexuality in the English public schools—then at Sandhurst. He saw service in both world wars. A travel book, The Sunlit Caribbean, appeared in 1948. Other novels included Wheels within Wheels (1933) and Where the Clock Chimes Twice (1952). Island in the Sun (1956) proved a highly successful piece (as well as a motion picture in 1957); in 1962 he wrote The Early Years of Alec Waugh and in 1967 the biographical My Brother Evelyn and Other Profiles. *Maugham had obviously read and been interested in Waugh’s The Loom of Youth and in the summer of 1931, learning of Waugh’s residence at Villefranche on the Riviera, invited him to the *Villa Mauresque for lunch. Both he and his brother Evelyn visited there fairly often during that summer, the elder Waugh being a consistent admirer of Maugham’s work. In fact, for the next thirty years, Alec Waugh would on more than one occasion be identified as the president of Maugham’s fan club. Waugh last saw Maugham at Nice in January 1965. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Cordell; DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
WEBSTER, BENJAMIN
303
WAUGH, ARTHUR (1866–1943). English literary critic and publisher, father of *Alec and *Evelyn Waugh. In 1905, as chairman of the London publishing firm of Chapman and Hall, Waugh held no immediate desire to publish a work by *Maugham but nonetheless posted an inquiry to the writer’s literary agent, James Brand Pinker. Waugh admitted a dislike for the gloom and pessimism of Maugham’s short stories, but he asked to review the manuscript of the novel *The Bishop’s Apron, then entitled *Loaves and Fishes. Chapman and Hall agreed to publish the work, and Waugh offered Maugham an advance of seventy-five pounds. The writer accepted, and the novel appeared in 1906. It did not prove a financial or a literary success, for which Maugham blamed Waugh. Bibliography: DNB; Morgan.
WAUGH, EVELYN ARTHUR ST. JOHN (1903–1966). English novelist, born in Hampstead, London, son of *Arthur Waugh, younger brother of *Alec Waugh, and father of the journalist and novelist Alexander Auberon Waugh (1939–). Waugh studied at Lancing School, then at Hertford College, Oxford, where a third-class degree limited him to several posts as an assistant schoolmaster. He eventually established a reputation with such popular social satirical novels as Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), and Scoop (1938). In 1930, he converted to Roman Catholicism, and his later fiction reveals a more serious attitude. Put Out More Flags appeared in 1942, and in Brideshead Revisited (1945; later a successful television series), Waugh presented a nostalgic evocation of his student days at Oxford. His ‘‘sword of honor’’ trilogy consists of Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961), while his 1957 novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, focuses upon social adventures of a fifty-year-old Roman Catholic novelist. Waugh’s diaries appeared in 1976, and his letters in 1976. In 1936, Waugh received the Hawthornden Prize for his biography of Edmund Campion, the sixteenth-century Jesuit saint (1540–1581), and Men at Arms earned him the James Tait Black Prize. Waugh and *Maugham first met at some point in 1930, when the London columnist *Godfrey Winn (1906–1971) introduced them. The two writers enjoyed an amicable relationship, with Waugh usually looking favorably upon Maugham’s fiction and generally admiring his style and economy of language. However, in 1954, when the publishing firm of *William Heinemann commissioned a Festschrift in honor of Maugham’s eightieth birthday, Waugh declined an invitation to contribute. Bibliography: Curtis (1977); DNB; Drabble; Morgan.
WEBSTER, BENJAMIN (1864–1947). British actor, grandson of the actor, manager, and dramatist Benjamin Nottingham Webster (1797–1882). Webster’s father intended the son to follow him in the legal profession, but he went instead into the theater. He first appeared with Sir John Hare (1844–1921) and William
304
WEIDMAN, JEROME
Hunter Kendal (1843–1917), played at the Lyceum Theatre with Sir Henry Irving (1838–1905), and then toured the United States. Webster also belonged to the companies of Sir George Alexander (1858–1918), Ellen Alice Terry (1847– 1928), and *Dionysius (Dot) Boucicault (1859–1929) and played roles in plays by William Shakespeare (1564–1616), *George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (1855–1934), and James Matthew Barrie (1860– 1937). Webster married in 1892 the English actress May Whitty (1865–1948). In 1939, he went to the United States, where he remained and acted until his death. Webster starred as †Basil Kent in the commercial revival of *Maugham’s *A Man of Honour (1903) when it opened at the Avenue Theatre, at the Embankment end of Northumberland Avenue, London, on 18 February 1904. He played opposite Muriel Wylford, who performed in the role of †Jenny Bush. The play lasted for twenty-eight performances. Bibliography: Hartnoll; Morgan.
WEIDMAN, JEROME (1913–). American writer, born in New York City. Known for his direct and often unpleasant stories about, and character portrayals of, Jewish life, his novels include I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1937) and What’s in It for Me? (1938), both concerning an unscrupulous New York dress manufacturer; I’ll Never Go There Any More (1941); Too Early To Tell (1946); The Sound of Bow Bells, about a Jewish novelist willing to sacrifice for the sake of his literary reputation; A Family Fortune (1978), in which he chronicles the rise and fall of a Jewish racketeer. In 1960, Weidman collaborated with George Abbott (1887–1995) in the Pulitzer Prize play Fiorello! His collected stories appear in The Death of Dickie Draper (1965). *Maugham met the twenty-seven-year-old Weidman in late November 1940 in New York at a dinner party hosted by Richard L. Simon of the publishing firm of Simon and Schuster. The two became friends and carried on a correspondence; Maugham thought that Weidman wrote ‘‘clever’’ novels. Bibliography: Hart; Morgan.
WELLCOME, HENRY (1903–?). Technically *Maugham’s stepson, but actually the son of *Henry Solomon Wellcome and *Syrie Barnardo Wellcome. Mentally ill from birth, he eventually settled with a family of dairy farmers near London. After his parents’ separation in September 1910, he went to live with his father but spent summers with his mother. Bibliography: Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
WELLCOME, HENRY SOLOMON (1853–1936). American chemical manufacturer, born at Almond, Wisconsin, the younger son of the Rev. Solomon Cummings Wellcome and Mary Curtis Wellcome. Educated in Garden City, Minnesota, he came under the influence of William Worrell Mayo, took an interest in pharmacy, and entered the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. After
WELLS, HERBERT GEORGE
305
apprenticeships with American firms, Wellcome toured Peru and Ecuador and, in 1880, came to England, where he formed a partnership with Silas M. Burroughs (?–1895). Burroughs, Wellcome, and Company manufactured chemicals, alkaloids, and pharmaceutical products—the last including a wide range of compressed drugs known as ‘‘tabloids.’’ With his vast wealth Wellcome founded a number of institutions to promote medical research and education: the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories (1894), the Wellcome Laboratories, London (1896), the Gordon Memorial College, Khartoum, Sudan (1903), the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, London (1913), the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research, London (1913), and the Wellcome Museum of Medical Science. Indeed, Wellcome bequeathed practically all of his £3 million estate to scientific research and education. In addition, he found time to engage in archaeological research in Africa and Palestine. In 1928, the senate of Edinburgh University conferred upon Wellcome the honorary degree of LL.D., and in 1932, he became an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Welcome became a naturalized British citizen in 1910. On 25 June 1901, at St. Mark’s Church, Surbiton, the forty-eight-year-old Wellcome married twenty-two-year-old Gwendolyn Maude Syrie Barnardo, whom he had met earlier that year at Khartoum. The couple settled into an estate in Kent, Wellcome went off on his archaeological expeditions, and the union gradually deteriorated. They entered into a deed of separation in September 1910, whereby Wellcome settled £2,400 per year on Syrie and took custody of their seven-year-old son, *Henry. Their divorce became final in February 1916, with *Maugham being named a corespondent. There exists no evidence that Maugham and Wellcome ever met. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); DNB; Morgan.
WELLS, HERBERT GEORGE (1866–1946). English novelist. Born at Bromley in Kent, the son of an unsuccessful tradesman and professional cricketer, Wells became apprenticed to a draper, taught at Midhurst Grammar School, studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington, London, and then turned his full attention to journalism and literature. In 1891, he married his cousin Isabel Wells and then eloped with a student, Catherine (Jane) Robbins, whom he married in 1895. Then for ten years he carried on an affair and had a child with the novelist *Rebecca West (Cecily Isabel Fairfield [1892–1983]). Essentially, he assumed an important role in disseminating the progressive social and political ideas that characterized the first three decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, when Queen Victoria died in January 1901, Wells remarked that her passing removed a great paperweight that had sat upon the minds of men for half a century. Those ideas manifest themselves in such scientific fantasies as The Time Machine (1895) and War of the Worlds (1898). Wells also produced a range of
306
WESCOTT, GLENWAY
comic novels that proved highly popular, particularly Kipps (1905), The History of Mr. Polly (1910), and The Research Magnificent (1915). A member of the Fabian Society, Wells often involved himself in public controversy, and his sociopolitical tracts focused on the role of science and the need for world peace: thus, The Outline of History (1920) and the Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (1932). *Maugham met Wells late in 1907 at the flat of a mutual friend, the journalist, wit, and third-rate novelist *Reginald Turner (1869–1938). From that time until Wells’ death in 1946, the two writers got along fairly well together but never became intimate friends. According to Maugham, Wells spent so much time on his mission of trying to reconstruct the world that he never really had time for other people—with the possible exception of his mistresses. Following the dissolution of his affair with Rebecca West in 1923, Wells moved to Grasse on the French Riviera with a mistress named Odette Keun; thus, when Maugham came to *Villa Mauresque some three years later, the two had numerous occasions upon which to meet. When Wells and Odette parted company, and she received the house, Wells continued to seek the warm climate of the Riviera and proved a frequent guest at the Mauresque. The two met in October 1941 in New York, where Wells expressed his disappointment over the failure of his American lectures: audiences could not always hear him, nor did they always want to listen to what they could hear. Although the character of †Edward Driffield in Maugham’s *Cakes and Ale (1930) represents most notably *Thomas Hardy (1940–1928), one recognizes a bit of Wells in him, especially during Driffield’s early period in the Kentish town of Blackstable. Bibliography: Cordell; Curtis (1977); Dickson; DNB; Drabble; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
WESCOTT, GLENWAY (1901–1987). American poet and writer of fiction and native of rural Wisconsin who lived mostly in Europe. A volume of poems, The Bitterns, appeared in 1920, followed by a novel of the western frontier, The Apple of the Eye (1924); another volume of poems, Natives of Rock (1925); and a collection of short stories, Like a Lover (1926). In The Grandmothers (1927; published in England as A Family Portrait), Wescott depicts a midwestern family through the eye of one who has fled the country for Europe. He continued his negative view toward America in a collection of short stories, Good-Bye, Wisconsin (1928), and in a volume of essays, Fear and Trembling (1932). The 1940 novel, The Pilgrim Hawk, occurs in Paris, while Apartment in Athens (1945) focuses upon a German officer living with a Greek family. Images of Truth combine criticism and reminiscences, including an essay on *Maugham. Considered an extremely close friend and confidant of Maugham, the twentyseven-year-old Wescott first met the English writer at the *Villa Mauresque in 1928 and then saw him again at a luncheon in London in 1941. Their relationship solidified during World War II beginning in 1942, when Wescott spent
WEST, DAME REBECCA
307
several weeks in February and March with Maugham at *Nelson Doubleday’s estate in South Carolina. Wescott attended the funeral of Maugham’s secretary/ companion, *Gerald Haxton, in New York on 9 November 1944, sitting next to Maugham during the service at St. James’ Episcopal Church. In 1948, Wescott and Monroe Wheeler, the art curator, shared a New York apartment on Park Avenue, which they outfitted with modern paintings and, in the style of the Parisian salon, hosted persons of letters. Thus, when Maugham visited the place in February 1949, he received the royal treatment as a guest of honor. Bibliography: Hart; Morgan; Wescott.
WEST, DAME REBECCA (1892–1983). English novelist and literary critic, born Cicily Isabel Fairfield, the youngest of three daughters of Charles Fairfield (–1906), a onetime army officer and itinerant journalist, and his wife, Isabella Campbell Mackenzie. Fairfield abandoned his family in 1901, and Isabella Fairfield returned to Edinburgh with her daughters. Educated at George Watson’s Ladies’ College, Edinburgh, and at the Academy of Dramatic Art, London, Cicily Fairfield turned her attention first to the stage, and for that purpose she adopted her new name from a character that she played in Rosmersholm (1887) by *Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). In that piece, ‘‘Rebecca West’’ exists as a freethinking woman who applies her charms in attempts to claim Johannes Rosmer for the liberal cause that she espouses. In so doing, Rebecca drives Beata Rosmer, his wife, to suicide. West’s literary career began as a journalist, and she wrote for no fewer than nine periodicals. Her best work emerged from her studies of the Nuremberg war trials: The Meaning of Treason (1947; revised 1965) and A Train of Powder (1955). Her novels include The Judge (1922), The Thinking Reed (1936), and The Birds Fall Down (1966). The critically acclaimed Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1937) constitutes a historical and descriptive study of Yugoslavia, while This Real Night (1984), Cousin Rosamund (1985) and Sunflower (1986; unfinished) stand as posthumously published novels. Her ten-year liaison (1913– 1923) with *H. G. Wells (1866–1946) produced a son, the critic and author Anthony West (1914–). In 1930, she married Henry Maxwell Andrews (–1968), a banker. West became a Dame of the British Empire in 1959. West came in contact with both *Maugham and his wife, *Syrie Barnardo Maugham. She stated that she had known the writer since age eighteen, which means that she met him sometime in 1910, most likely through both of their relationships with *Violet Hunt. From West’s viewpoint, Maugham lacked interest, as a man as well as a writer, while she admired Syrie, in whose circle of friends she resided, especially for her talents for conversing, entertaining, and decorating. Throughout her career as a literary critic, West rarely displayed enthusiasm for Maugham’s work. Bibliography: DNB; Drabble; Morgan; Shattock.
308
WHARTON, EDITH JONES NEWBOLD
WHARTON, EDITH JONES NEWBOLD (1861?–1937). American novelist and short story writer. Born in New York City, Wharton received her education at home and in Europe. Early in her literary career, she formed a lasting friendship with *Henry James (1843–1916), who both encouraged and influenced her work. She became a major novelist in 1905, with the publication of the tragedy The House of Mirth, moved to France in 1907, and in 1911 she produced her most noted novel, Ethan Frome. In 1920, she received the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, and again in 1924 for In Old New York. Wharton’s autobiography, A Backward Glance, appeared in 1934. Her two volumes of poetry came forth as Artemis to Actaeon (1909) and Twelve Poems (1926), while she published ten volumes of short stories between 1901 and 1937. *Maugham met Edith Wharton in November 1908 at a luncheon in the fashionable London home of *Lady Mary Mackenzie St. Helier. Their conversation lasted for twenty minutes, with Wharton doing most of the talking. Maugham apparently shocked her by asking if she had ever read ‘‘thrillers,’’ and the conversation ended abruptly. Although by the time, some nineteen years later, Maugham came to occupy the *Villa Mauresque, Wharton had already settled at nearby Hyeres, the two never met again. She apparently liked his story *‘‘Rain,’’ while he thought that she deserved a minor place in American literary history. Maugham ended his essay *‘‘Some Novelists I Have Known’’ (*The Vagrant Mood [1952]) with an account of his meeting with Edith Wharton. ‘‘She was an admirable creature,’’ he stated, ‘‘but not my cup of tea.’’ Bibliography: Vagrant Mood; DAB; Hart.
WHEELER, MONROE (1900–1988). The curator of the Museum of Modern Art, on West Fifty-third Street, New York City, Wheeler came to know Maugham through their mutual friend, the writer *Glenway Wescott (1901– 1987). In May 1944, when a patient at Doctor’s Hospital, New York, suffering from tuberculosis and Addison’s disease, *Maugham’s secretary/companion *Gerald Haxton wanted to pass the time by doing needlepoint, Maugham went to Wheeler and persuaded the curator to lend him a rare book of cutouts by the French painter *Henri Matisse (1869–1954) so that Haxton could use the forms as patterns. Reportedly, Maugham never returned the book, which aroused Wheeler’s ire. Wheeler could not have been angry for too long, since he did attend Haxton’s funeral on 9 November of the same year. Further, after Glenway Wescott and Wheeler moved into their New York apartment on Park Avenue in late 1948, they invited Maugham in February 1949 as guest of honor at one of their highly fashionable salonlike gatherings. Bibliography: Morgan.
WHITSTABLE, KENT. An old fishing port once famous for its oysters and the once-profitable Royal Native Oyster Stores, as well as, in the late nineteenth century, a seaside resort, Whitstable lies between six and seven miles north of
WILDE, OSCAR FINGAL O’FLAHERTIE WILLS
309
Canterbury. When ten-year-old Maugham came there in 1884, following the death of his father, *Robert Ormond Maugham, to live with his uncle, the *Reverend Henry MacDonald Maugham, and his wife, Barbara Sophia Von Scheidlin Maugham, the town numbered between 8,000 and 10,000. The oyster industry claimed almost 200 boats, and Whitstable harbor could house 300 brigantines that served the colliers from Newcastle. The Railway Inn, the Duke of Kent, and the Bear and Key functioned as the establishments for drink, food, lodging, and talk. Rev. Maugham served as the forty-fifth incumbent of the parish of All Saints, Whitstable, and he and his wife resided at the rectory on Canterbury Road. When Henry MacDonald Maugham arrived there in 1871, the church proved to be in a state of disrepair; by April 1876, the old tower had been restored, and the rest of the church rebuilt. For *Maugham the novelist and short story writer, Whitstable becomes the town of ‘‘Blackstable’’ in *‘‘Daisy’’ (1896), *Mrs. Craddock (1902), *Of Human Bondage (1915), and *Cakes and Ale (1930). Maugham managed to return to Whitstable in 1948 and 1951 and lodged at the Bear and Key Inn. Bibliography: Calder (1989/1990); Cordell; Curtis (1974, 1977); Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
‘‘WHY DO YOU DISLIKE US?’’ An essay published in the Saturday Evening Post for 13 April 1942. It concerns *Maugham’s belief that Americans generally held negative feelings and opinions about the British relative to World War II. Reportedly, within two weeks following its publication, Maugham received 200 inflammatory letters from irate American readers. Bibliography: Morgan; Stott (1973).
WILDE, OSCAR FINGAL O’FLAHERTIE WILLS (1854–1900). Irish poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist born in Dublin, the son of the noted surgeon Dr. Sir William Robert Wills Wilde (1815–1876) and the poet and journalist Lady Jane Francesca Elgee Wilde (1826–1896). Wilde studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where, in 1874, he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘‘Ravenna.’’ He then went to London and established himself among the social and literary circles there, becoming celebrated for his wit and flamboyant manner and proclaiming his allegiance to the ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ movement. Wilde’s early publications included his Poems (1881) and the comic plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Ernest (1895). Following a lecture tour of the United States during 1882–1883, he married, in 1884, Constance Lloyd (1858–1898); they had two sons, Cyril (1885–1915) and Vyvyan (1886–1967), for whom he wrote the classic children’s fairy stories, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). His darkest moments found their expression in The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and De Profundis (1905), reflecting two years of hard labor for homosexual practices and the abortive libel action against Sir John Sholto Douglas, eighth
310
WINDSOR, BESSIE WALLIS SPENCER SIMPSON, DUCHESS OF
marquis of Queensberry (1844–1890), who objected to Wilde’s association with his son, Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (1870–1945). Wilde died in exile at Paris, having taken on the name of ‘‘Sebastian Melmoth.’’ Although *Maugham never met or knew Wilde personally, the Irish writer had a profound effect upon him and his work, particularly the ridicule of the British nobility upon the London stage. When the Wilde scandal began at the end of February 1895, to be followed by the Irish writer’s trials, arrest, and imprisonment (1895–1897) for homosexual acts, twenty-one-year-old Maugham found himself in the third year of his studies at the medical college of St. Thomas’ Hospital, London. Simply, at that time, for one to admit to the practice of *homosexuality or, in Wilde’s case, to deny it in a court of law meant imprisonment. There exists little doubt that Maugham closely followed the proceedings and afterward took note of the exodus of English homosexuals from England to *France, *Italy, and *Spain—his friend *John Ellingham Brooks among them. There exists even less doubt that, after he left St. Thomas’, Maugham developed close relationships with a number of Wilde’s friends: the Canadian art critic and Wilde’s first lover, Robert Ross; the writer and artist Laurence Housman; the writer Robert Hichens; the minor writer and wit *Reginald Turner; the great comic and caricaturist *Max Beerbohm; and two of Wilde’s female literary friends, *Ada Leverson and Mabel Beardsley. Indeed, Ada Leverson passed on to Maugham the supreme compliment when she told him that he was very much like Wilde. For his part, Maugham believed he had gotten close to Wilde in spirit if not in body by having been loved by a woman (Ada Leverson) who had loved Wilde. Bibiography: Behrman; Curtis (1977); DNB; Drabble; Hart-Davis; Morgan.
WINDSOR, BESSIE WALLIS SPENCER SIMPSON, DUCHESS OF (1896–1986). Born in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, Wallis Simpson developed into an extrovert socialite and in 1916 married Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer, an American naval officer. The marriage lasted until 1927, and the year after its dissolution she married (1928) Ernest Simpson, an American-born Englishman who himself had been divorced. Having established herself in London society, Mrs. Simpson met, at a country-house party in 1931, Edward, Prince of Wales. In 1936, the year of the prince’s accession as King Edward VIII, Wallis Simpson obtained a divorce in England from Ernest Simpson on grounds of adultery. The king declared to the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin (1867– 1947), his determination to marry Wallis Simpson, even if it meant abdicating his throne. Wallis Simpson married Edward on 3 June 1937 in *France, and they resided in France and on the Bahamas. After Edward’s death in 1972, she lived in isolation and suffered ill health—dying in Paris. She was buried beside her husband at Windsor Castle. Mrs. Simpson, prior to her divorce from her second husband and marriage to Edward VIII, proved to have been a close friend of *Sybil Colefax, the fash-
WINN, GODFREY HERBERT
311
ionable London hostess and also one of *Maugham’s friends. Further, *Syrie Maugham, in New York in late 1938, told persons that she had done decorating for Wallis Simpson prior to her marrying Edward VIII, but exactly when and where have never been established. After her marriage to Edward, her associations with Maugham came, of course, in connection with those of her husband. Bibliography: Crystal; DNB; Morgan.
WINDSOR, EDWARD, DUKE OF (1894–1972). Formerly Edward VIII of England (January–December 1936). Born in Richmond, Surrey, the eldest son of George V (1865–1936). Edward received his education at Osborne, Dartmouth, and then Magdalen College, Oxford, before attending the Royal Naval College, joining the Royal Navy, and, in World War I, entering the Royal Army. He spent much of his time traveling and socializing, yet managed to become popular in the eyes of the people. Succeeding to the throne on 20 January 1936 upon the death of his father, Edward abdicated on 11 December 1936 to marry the twice-divorced commoner Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Given the title Duke of Windsor and an annual income of £60,000, he and his wife lived in Paris and, during 1940–1945, in the Bahamas, where Edward served as governor. He died in Paris, with his remains being buried at Windsor Castle. In the summer of 1938, the duke and duchess of Windsor rented a villa at Cap d’Antibes from one Sir Pomeroy Burton. On 5 August, *Maugham invited them to the *Villa Mauresque for dinner; his daughter, *Liza, functioned as hostess. Other occasional visits followed and at last Maugham could claim a speaking relationship with some form of royalty. Also, the duke may well have been responsible for telling Maugham about the Swiss restorative clinic of *Dr. Paul Niehans at Clarens near Vevey, and both became regular visitors there for the Swiss physician’s questionable cell therapy. Bibliography: Behrman; DNB; Morgan.
WINN, GODFREY HERBERT (1906–1971). English popular newspaper columnist and the younger brother of Sir Charles Rodger Noel Winn (1903–1972), lord justice of appeal. In addition to the novels Dreams Fade (1927) and Squirrel’s Cage (1928), Winn published The Young Queen: The Story of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (1952) and a two-volume autobiography, The Infirm Glory (1969) and The Positive Hour (1970). In addition to his ability at bridge, he had proven one of the best tennis players in England, having won the South of England Junior Tennis Championship in 1919 at age thirteen. He also walked the London stage as a child actor, playing in The Marquis (1917?) by *Noel Coward (1899–1973). During World War II he served as a war correspondent, participating in 1942 as the only reporter on the disastrous convoy from Iceland to Archangel in which twenty-three of the thirty-six vessels were lost. At Winn’s death from a heart attack while playing tennis, his will was probated at £361,000.
312
‘‘WINTER CRUISE’’
*Maugham met the twenty-two-year-old Winn at a bridge party in London in April 1928, invited him to spend August at the *Villa Mauresque, and advanced him the price of first-class train fare. Winn gave Maugham tennis lessons in exchange for advice about working and writing. After reading Winn’s second novel, The Squirrel’s Cage, Maugham advised him to turn to journalism and to return to the Mauresque in April 1929. He came then and again in April 1931. Finally, on 24 January 1964, two days after Maugham’s ninetieth birthday, Winn visited Maugham at the Mauresque. On the first day, Maugham did not recognize his friend but rallied sufficiently on the twenty-fifth, when they went to a birthday luncheon hosted by a Riviera neighbor, a Lady Doverdale. Winn and his initial 1928 visit to the Villa Mauresque served as the model for the young writer †Peter Melrose in Maugham’s short story *‘‘The Voice of the Turtle’’ (1940). Bibliography: DNB; Morgan.
‘‘WINTER CRUISE’’ (1943, 1947). A short story, published initially in 1943 and included in the collection *Creatures of Circumstance (1947). †Venetia Reid (her Christian name happens to be Alice), a passenger on the German freighter Friedrich Weber, owns a tearoom at a celebrated beauty spot in the west of England. Although an avid reader, at age forty she proves herself a considerable, excruciating bore, as manifested in her long, stupid face. She shares a cabin with a black woman, †Madame Bollin. The ship runs from Hamburg to Cartagena and back again, and at Christmastime, after discharging persons at Port au Prince, Haiti, Miss Reid remains the only passenger. Its skipper, †Captain Erdmann, a jovial asthmatic, has a keen sense of humor and, at the outset, tries to keep Miss Reid occupied in conversation. Miss Reid, in turn, tries to keep the crew and officers stimulated with her questions, reactions, and insatiable thirst for information. She succeeds only in driving them to distraction; when they attempt to shut her off by talking only in German, she forces them to stop and to speak English. Finally, Captain Erdmann and †Hans Krause, the mate, so as not to have their New Year’s Eve celebrations dampened, decide to put an end to Miss Reid’s talking. The ship’s †Doctor maintains that all she needs is a lover. ‘‘ ‘A lover would bring her peace. Those jangled nerves of her would relax. At least for an hour she would have lived.’ ’’ The twenty-one-year-old †Radio Operator, a perfect specimen of young Teutonic manhood, is nominated for the job of satisfying Miss Reid’s requirements. The young man’s first assault proves a total failure, since he comes to Miss Reid’s cabin and asks if she wants to send a radio message. When she declines, he leaves. On the next night, however, he achieves the desired results, and the officers and Miss Reid spend a pleasant and, for the most part, quiet New Year’s Eve celebration. She spends the rest of the journey eating like a wolf, maintaining her silence, and focusing upon the Radio Operator. In the end, the officers are sad to see her leave the ship,
WOLF, MAX
313
and Miss Reid, for her part, has come away from the experience fully realizing that ‘‘travel is a wonderful education.’’ Bibliography: Collected Short Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance; Curtis (1974).
WISEMAN, SIR WILLIAM GEORGE EDEN (1887–1962). An upper-class graduate of Cambridge and university boxer, Wiseman, prior to 1914, held a position with the banking firm of Kuhn and Loeb. At the onset of World War I, he joined the Duke of Cornwall’s light infantry and suffered a German gas attack. Sent to the United States, supposedly at the head of the British purchasing mission there, he in fact headed British intelligence in that country, working closely with Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy adviser, Colonel Edward Mandell House (1858–1938). Following that tour of duty, Wiseman turned his attention to establishing espionage activities in Russia, principally to help keep the Russians in the war against the Germans and Austrians. Specifically, he wanted an agent in Petrograd to counter German pacifist activities there and to prevent a potential *Kerensky government withdrawal. Wiseman called upon *Maugham, whose family he had known (most likely his older brother, *Frederic Herbert Maugham), in New York in June 1917 and convinced the writer to undertake the task as agent to Petrograd under the code name ‘‘Somerville.’’ Wiseman adavnced the writer $21,000 to cover expenses and to enable him to finance the mission. On 7 November 1917, the Kerensky government was overthrown, and Wiseman recalled Maugham to London. He presented his report at No. 10 Downing Street, which Wiseman read aloud to the assembled members of British intelligance because Maugham feared his stammer would impair communication. Bibliography: Calder (1972/1973); Curtis (1974, 1977); Fowler; Morgan.
WITHERS, GOOGIE (1917–). British actress, who divided her career, with equal success, between the stage and the motion picture screen. Withers married the Australian stage and screen actor John McCallum (1917–) and in 1960 returned with him to Australia. In 1977, she starred as †Lady Catherine ‘‘Kitty’’ Champion-Cheney in a revival of *Maugham’s comedy *The Circle (1921). Bibliography: Halliwell; Mander and Mitchenson (1955b).
WOLF, MAX (1885–1970). In January 1942, suffering from the fevers and chills of a malarial condition contracted twenty years earlier in a visit to *Siam, *Maugham consulted, in the fashionable Upper East Side of New York, Dr. Max Wolf, a physician of Viennese origin. Maugham’s secretary and companion *Gerald Haxton, himself only two years from his death and suffering from the early stages of Addison’s disease and tuberculosis, accompanied the writer. A disciple of the Swiss physician *Dr. Paul Niehans and thus a proponent of cellular therapy, Wolf had concocted an elixir from goats that he labeled ‘‘Bo-
314
WOLMARK, ALFRED
gomolets serum.’’ After his examination, Wolf told Maugham that he had discovered a large but benign gelatinous tumor, as large as a baby’s head, in the pylorus and blocking his stomach. Wolf’s treatment included enzymes and 125 grains of quinine in a single injection. For whatever reasons, both the tumor and the malaria vanished, and Maugham could not praise Wolf’s abilities high or long enough. Maugham was still seeing Wolf as late as September 1951. When Maugham’s nephew, *Robin Maugham, visited his uncle in South Carolina in December 1945, he had developed a stammer and suffered from amnesia and depression—all the result of his head wounds during the North African campaign. In January 1945, Maugham sent Robin to Dr. Max Wolf; upon his return to South Carolina, Robin was so ill that he had to take to his bed. According to Maugham in letters to Robin’s father, *Lord Frederic Herbert Maugham, Wolf had traced Robin’s problems to an inferiority complex; he believed that he could not rise to the reputations of his father and uncle. Wolf advised hard work and abstinence from alcohol. Bibliography: Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan.
WOLMARK, ALFRED (fl. 1920–1940). In May 1930, a London painter by the name of Alfred Wolmark requested the opportunity to paint *Maugham’s portrait, and the writer agreed. Maugham went to Wolmark’s studio, where the two talked for more than an hour while Wolmark waited for what he termed a natural expression. Irritated with the delay, Maugham demanded that the painter get on with his task. Wolmark explained that he had been waiting for Maugham to relax and to relieve himself of an expression of bitterness to the world. The source for this incident comes from the 1930 file of the London Daily Express, and may prove as much anecdotal as it is factual. Bibliography: Morgan.
‘‘A WOMAN OF FIFTY’’ (1946). A short story appearing in the collection *Creatures of Circumstance. Set in Florence, *Italy, the piece concerns a son who murders his father when the son’s American wife comes between them. The †Narrator had first met †Laura Clayton Greene, originally from San Francisco, twenty-five years earlier and just after World War I in Florence. Now, at the age of fifty, Laura teaches Renaissance and Italian literature at a small midwest university. Her second husband, †Jasper Greene, slightly over thirty years of age, also teaches at the university. In Florence, the wealthy Laura had met and married †Tito de San Pietro, a young, handsome man with an addiction to gambling. Tito’s widowed and poor father, †Count Carlo di San Pietro, a former diplomat, lived in a fifteenth-century villa thirty miles from Florence. After the wedding, the couple moved into the villa with the Count. Tito misinterprets the relationship between Laura and his father, to which the latter reacts negatively; tensions between father and son increase, and Tito concludes that if he should uncover evidence of a liaison between Laura and the Count, he will kill them
WOOLF, ADELINE VIRGINIA STEPHEN
315
both. Laura, in the meantime, becomes pregnant. In the end, the father and son quarrel, and Tito shoots the Count. Tito’s lawyers tell Laura that the only way she can save her husband from prison is to admit to an affair with Count Carlo. She agrees, Tito is declared insane and sent to an asylum, and her newborn child, a boy, lives for only twenty-four hours. At the end of the story, the Narrator and his host, †Professor Wyman Holt, go to the Greenes’ for dinner, and there the conversation turns to art, literature, music, and the theater. ‘‘I wondered,’’ muses the Narrator, ‘‘whether it crossed her [Laura’s] mind that all this chatter about art didn’t amount to much when compared with those incidents of blood and passion that she remembered.’’ But, he questions, does she remember? Has Laura not, since her marriage to the boorish Greene, succeeded in erasing the entire episode of her marriage to Tito and the loss of her child from her mind? Bibliography: Collected Short Stories. II. The World Over; Creatures of Circumstance; Curtis (1974).
WOMAN OF THE WORLD (1951). See THEATRE. WOOLF, ADELINE VIRGINIA STEPHEN (1882–1941). English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Born in Hyde Park Gate, London, the third of the four children of the literary historian, scholar, and essayist Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) and Julia Duckworth (1847–1895). Woolf received a private but irregular education at home, principally in her father’s library. In 1912, she married the publisher and writer Leonard Sidney Woolf (1880–1969), and together they established the Hogarth Press in 1917. A leading member of the London Bloomsbury Group, which included her sister, Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Giles Lytton Strachey, and Edwin Morgan Forster, she contributed significantly to the development of the twentieth-century English novel with such pieces as The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), wherein she set forth an impressionistic style and furthered the development of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Woolf also published critical and biographical essays, as well as critical reviews. Most noteworthy among her prose nonfiction one finds A Room of One’s Own (1929) and The Common Reader (1925). Following bouts with mental illness, she took her own life by drowning in the river Ouse, near her home in Rodmell, Sussex. Woolf began to review and comment on *Maugham’s work as early as January 1905, when, at age twenty-three, she reviewed his *The Land of the Blessed Virgin for the Times Literary Supplement. She may have ignored his place among his contemporaries, but she generally reacted favorably to his work— particularly the prose nonfiction with its honesty and clear style. Since they both knew the London hostess *Sybil Colefax and attended her dinner parties, they obviously met on more than one occasion. In September 1940, before leaving
316
WOOLLCOTT, ALEXANDER HUMPHREYS
England for New York, Maugham conversed with Woolf at a dinner party in Westminster. The air-raid sirens sounded, and Maugham offered to take her home. Woolf insisted on leaving alone, but Maugham—always the gentleman— followed her at a distance during the barrage. That was the last occasion on which he saw her. Bibliography: Cordell; Curtis (1974, 1977); DNB; Drabble; Morgan; Shattock.
WOOLLCOTT, ALEXANDER HUMPHREYS (1887–1943). American drama and literary critic. Born in Phalanx, New Jersey, Woollcott attended Hamilton College and then, prior to World War I, went to New York as a police reporter for the New York Times. He then shifted to the drama desk and, in 1914, received appointment as the paper’s drama critic. After two years with the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) during the war, he returned to the Times. In 1922, Woollcott went over to the New York Herald and then to the Sun in 1923. From 1925 to 1928 he served as drama critic for the New York World, after which he retired from journalism and devoted his time to broadcasting, lecture tours, and writing essays for newspapers and magazine. In addition to writing biographies of popular actors and actresses he collaborated with George S. Kaufman (1889–1961) on The Channel Road (1929) and The Dark Tower (1932) and even played roles on Broadway. Woollcott may best be remembered as the model for ‘‘Sheridan Whiteside’’ in The Man Who Came to Dinner by Kaufman and Moss Hart (1904–1961)—a part that he himself performed on the Broadway stage. In the summer of 1928, Woollcott and the comedian Arthur (Harpo) Marx (1888–1964) rented a villa at Antibes, on the French Riviera; during the course of the summer, *Maugham lunched there and, in turn, invited Woollcott and Marx to the *Villa Mauresque. Bibliography: DAB; Hartnoll; Morgan.
WRIGHT, HAIDEE (1868–1943). English actress. She starred as the widow †Charlotte Littlewood in *Maugham’s *The Unknown (1920). Her performance during the second act proved so stirring that, on the opening night (20 August 1920), the members of audience would not cease their applause until Wright came for a curtain call. Bibliography: Curtis (1977); Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
A WRITER’S NOTEBOOK (1949). An autobiographical work, begun by *Maugham as early as 1892. Published in London by *William Heinemann and in October in Garden City, New York, by Doubleday and Company; reprinted by Arno Press (1977) and Penguin Books (1984). The volume consists essentially of extracts from fifteen volumes of notes that Maugham had maintained from age eighteen through age seventy (1944). After he had written the extracts, he destroyed the actual notebooks, and thus A
WYLFORD, MURIEL
317
Writer’s Notebook contains only about one-fourth of the material that Maugham had written. For instance, the published version contains nothing for the year 1895 and only three pages for the period 1897–1900. Generally, the extracts focused upon descriptions of, and comments upon, persons; travel observations and descriptions; fragments of actual dialogue; character sketches; story, play, and novel outlines; philosophical observations; and epigrams. There exists little doubt that the real value of the work lies in a communication from one writer, Maugham, to other writers who would read the extracts. Thus, in the last extract (1944), Maugham reflects upon *Of Human Bondage (1915), generally supposed to have been his best book. Its sales prove that it is still widely read, and it was published thirty years ago. That is a long life for a novel. But posterity is little inclined to occupy itself with works of great length, and I take it that with the passing of the present generation, which very much to my own surprise has found it significant, it will be forgotten along with many other better books. I think that one or two of my comedies may retain for some time a kind of pale life. . . . I think that a few of my best stories will find their way into anthologies for a good many years to come if only because some of them deal with circumstances and places to which the passage of time and the growth of civilisation will give a romantic glamour. . . . And if I am mistaken and I am forgotten a month after my death I shall know nothing about it.
The message here is plain, and any writer who would ignore it would be guilty of both ignorance and foolishness. Bibliography: Brander; Burt; Cordell; Curtis (1974); Epstein; Robin Maugham (1966); Morgan; Sanders; Stott (1973); Vidal.
THE WRITER’S POINT OF VIEW (1951). A twenty-three-page booklet, being a collection of brief essays by Maugham and constituting the ninth volume in the National Book League annual lectures, published at London by Cambridge University Press. A variation on thoughts expressed in *A Writer’s Notebook (1949). Bibliography: Curtis (1974); Stott (1973).
WYLFORD, MURIEL (fl. 1890–1915). English character actress. Wylford wanted to revive *Maugham’s *A Man of Honour (1903) following its brief run with the Stage Society (February 1903), and thus she starred in the commercial production at the Avenue Theatre, London, for twenty-eight performances, beginning 18 February 1904. Bibliography: Mander and Mitchenson (1955b); Morgan.
Y ‘‘THE YELLOW STREAK’’ (1925). A short story, first published in 1925 and included in the 1926 collection *The Casuarina Tree. The story essentially recounts the actual journey of *Maugham and his secretary/companion *Gerald Haxton as they traveled, in a vessel manned by convicts, up the Sarawak River in *Borneo in 1922. In the fictionalized version, a mining engineer, †Campion, and a planter, †Izzart, travel in a boat manned by prisoners up the same Sarawak River in Borneo. Campion, an ugly-looking fellow, has been sent by the †Sultan of Sembulo to find minerals. Izzart, his companion and guide, as well as the apparent gentleman, tall and handsome, has been educated at Harrow and can speak both Malay and Dyak. He feels a strong sense of superiority over Campion. Suddenly they encounter the Bore—a great mass of water eight to twelve feet high. Izzart immediately becomes utterly terrified into inaction, and when he hears Campion calling for help, he pretends that he has not heard him. Izzart clutches a floating oar and, with the help of the native †Hassan, swims to the shore, thus saving himself. In his mind, Campion has drowned. Later, much to Izzart’s horror, Campion strolls ashore. From that point, the story becomes a psychological study of Izzart as he collapses spiritually under the burden of his own cowardice and the fear that Campion will reveal his ‘‘yellow streak’’ to others. Izzart’s shame also seeps seeps through, and destroys, the gentlemanly mask that he had worn prior to the incident and throughout most of his life. In reality, he is a mixture of native and white, and he lives in fear that he will be discovered. In addition, he blames the fact of his birth for his cowardice. For his part, Campion reacts normally and without malice. Indeed, he emerges as the true gentleman, for he recognizes the ‘‘yellow streak’’ to be an integral part of Izzart’s nature— and of human nature in general. Therefore, he offers—sincerely and without
‘‘THE YELLOW STREAK’’
319
malice—a cheroot to Izzart. After all, announces Campion, ‘‘ ‘I’ve been frightened too often myself to blame any one who shows the white feather. I’m not going to tell a soul.’ ’’ Bibliography: Casuarina Tree; Collected Short Stories. I. East and West; Curtis (1974); Holden.
Z ZIPKIN, JEROME ROBERT (1915–1995). An American Jewish real estate heir, a likable international social gadfly, and a piece of the mosaic that formed the character of †Elliott Templeton in *The Razor’s Edge (1944). Born in Manhattan, New York City, the son of Annette and David Zipkin, Zipkin graduated from the Hun School, Princeton, New Jersey, and studied art and archaeology for two years at Princeton University. He then became involved in his father’s business as an assistant; following David Zipkin’s death, Jerome looked after the family real estate interests, which he later sold. Zipkin carved out a reputation as a favorite escort of fashionable women whose husbands considered themselves too busy or too bored to accompany their wives to social events. Thus, the term ‘‘walker,’’ first cited by Women’s Wear Daily, applied directly to him. A longtime friend, escort, and confidant of Nancy Reagan, Zipkin functioned as a member of President Ronald Reagan’s intimate coterie during the latter’s years in the White House, and he came to Washington at least once each week. Reportedly, Zipkin and Mrs. Reagan spoke weekly by telephone, exchanging gossip. Zipkin’s collection of Maugham correspondence (as well as letters from *Alan Searle) and manuscripts lies with the University of Texas at Austin. A close friend of Maugham, and beginning in 1949, a frequent visitor to the *Villa Mauresque, Zipkin also proved one of the writer’s favorite bridge partners. According to Maugham, he knew everyone. In November 1955, at Sotheby’s London, Zipkin purchased the manuscript of *A Moon and Sixpence (1919) from the library of the portrait painter *Sir Gerald Kelly for £2,600—then a record price for a manuscript of a living author. His correspondence between 1962 and 1965 with Maugham’s third secretary/companion, *Alan Searle, forms a detailed (if not always objective) view of Maugham’s last years. Zipkin died of lung
ZOFFANY, JOHANN
321
cancer on 8 June 1995 in his home in the very Park Avenue building that his father had constructed. Bibliography: Robin Maugham (1989/1990); Morgan; Nemy.
ZOFFANY, JOHANN (1730–1810). German portrait painter born in Frankfurt. After studying art in Rome, Zoffany settled in London in about 1758, where he obtained royal patronage. He specialized in portraits and conversational pieces. In 1772, he moved to Florence, *Italy, working there until 1779; from 1783 to 1790, he resided in *India. Returning to England, Zoffany resided in Kew, where he died. *Maugham owned eight portraits by Zoffany, the most notable being that of the actor/manager David Garrick (1717–1779), entitled The Farmer’s Return (1762), a piece formerly in the possession of the noted actor/manager Sir Henry Irving (1838– 1905). Bibliography: Morgan; Vinson.
General Bibliography Citations in the bibliographies of the individual entries refer to names and complete citations in the following list. Aaronson, Stevenson M. L. ‘‘California Light: An Homage to Syrie Maugham in La Jolla.’’ Architectural Digest 51 (November 1994): 226–34. Adcock, A. St. John. Gods of Modern Grub Street. Toronto: Musson, 1923. Albion, Robert G. Five Centuries of Famous Ships: From the Santa Maria to the Glomar Explorer. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978. Aldington, Richard. W. Somerset Maugham: An Appreciation. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939; London: Folcroft, 1977. Allibone, S. Austin. A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors. 3 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1872–1877. Almeida, Cesario Salgado. ‘‘Somerset Maugham: His Life, His Ideas.’’ Estudos AngloAmericanos [Sa˜o Paulo, Brazil] (1979–1980): 3–4, 64–94. Amory, Richard. ‘‘Somerset Maugham.’’ Vector (January 1971): 10–12, 32–33, 46. Aramaki, Tetsuo. Maugham Kan-yo Jiten. Tokyo: Daigakushorin, 1967. (A Maugham concordance.)epArcher, Stanley. W. Somerset Maugham: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. ———. ‘‘Artists and Paintings in Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.’’ English Literature in Transition 14 (1971): 181–89. Auden, Wystan Hugh. ‘‘Notebooks of Somerset Maugham.’’ The New York Times Book Review, 23 October 1949, 1, 22. Barnes, Ronald E. The Dramatic Comedy of William Somerset Maugham. The Hague: Mouton 1968; New York: Humanities Press, 1968. Bedford, Barbara. Violet: The Story of the Irrepressible Violet Hunt and Her Circle of Lovers and Friends—Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Somerset Maugham, and Henry James. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley. A Biography. 2 vols. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.
324
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Behrman, S. N. People in a Diary: A Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1972. ———. Portrait of Max. An Intimate Memoir of Sir Max Beerbohm. New York: Random House, 1960. Belcham, John, and Richard Price, eds. A Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century World History. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1994. Belloc, Elizabeth. ‘‘The Stories of Somerset Maugham.’’ The Month 32 (1964): 67–72. Benson, Arthur Christopher, Sir Lawrence Weaver, and Frank Vigor Morley, eds. Everybody’s Book of the Queen’s Doll House. London: The Daily Telegraph and Methuen, 1924. Benson, Edward Frederic. As We Were: A Victorian Peep Show. London: Longman, Green and Company, 1930; rpt. London: Hogarth, 1985. Boardman, Gerald. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1914–1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869–1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Braendlin, Bonnie Hoover. ‘‘The Prostitute as Scapegoat: Mildred Rogers in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.’’ In The Image of the Prostitute in Modern Literature, edited by Pierre L. Horn and Mary Beth Pringle, 9–18. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1984. Brander, Lawrence. Somerset Maugham. A Guide. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, (1963); New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963. Breen, Robert S. ‘‘A Chamber Theatre Production of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage: A Report by the Director.’’ Literature in Performance: A Journal of Literary and Performing Art 1 no. 1 (1980): 62–67. Breit, Harvey. The Writer Observed. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1956. Brewster, Dorothy, and John Angus Burrell. Adventure or Experience: Four Essays on Certain Writers and Readers of Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930. Brophy, John. Somerset Maugham. Rev. ed. London: Longmans Green, (The British Council and the National Book League), 1958. Brown, Ivor. W. Somerset Maugham. London: International Textbook, 1970; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970. Brown, John Mason. Two on the Aisle: Ten Years of the American Theatre in Performance. New York: W. W. Norton, 1938. Buchanan, Donald W. James Wilson Morrice. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1947. Burgess, Anthony. ‘‘Somerset Maugham: 1874–1965.’’ The Listener 74, no. 1917 (23 December 1965): 1033. Burt, Forrest D. W. Somerset Maugham. London: Macmillan, 1985; Boston: Twayne, 1986. Calder, Robert Lorin. Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham. London: Heinemann, 1989; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. ———. ‘‘Maugham Revealed.’’ Etudes Anglaises: Grande-Bretagne, Etas-Unis 31 (1978a): 331–39. ———. ‘‘Somerset Maugham and the Cinema.’’ Literature/Film Quarterly 6 (1978b): 262–73. ———. ‘‘W. Somerset Maugham’s Strictly Personal: A Missing Chapter.’’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 72 (1978c): 299–303.
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
325
———. W. Somerset Maugham and the Quest for Freedom. London: Heinemann, 1972; New York: Doubleday, 1973. Carbuccia, Horace de. ‘‘Adieu a Mon Ami Anglais.’’ Gringoire 7 (November 1941): 1–2. (Reissued as a pamphlet under the same title, Paris: Les Editions de France, 1942.) ———. Theatre de Somerset Maugham. Paris: Editions de France, 1940. Chari, V.K.S. ‘‘Circumference to Centre: A Study in Somerset Maugham’s Novels.’’ Commonwealth Quarterly 6 (December 1981): 54–69. Colburn, William E. ‘‘Dr. Maugham’s Prescription for Success.’’ Emory University Quarterly 19 (1963): 14–21. (On Liza of Lambeth.) Connolly, Cyril. ‘‘The Art of Being Good.’’ The New Statesman and Nation 28, no. 705 (26 August 1944): 140. Contemporary Authors. Detroit: Gale Research, 1962– . Cordell, Richard Albert. Somerset Maugham: A Biographical and Critical Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961. Rev. as Somerset Maugham, a Writer for All Seasons: A Biographical and Critical Study, 1969. Costa, Richard Hauer. ‘‘Maugham’s ‘Partial Self’: The ‘Unexpected View’ on the Way to ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych.’ ’’ CEA Critic 43, no. 4 (May 1981): 3–7. (Concerns ‘‘Sanatorium.’’) ———. ‘‘A Pleasure, Mr. Maugham.’’ Nimrod [University of Tulsa] 21, no. 1 (1976– 1977): 108–22. Cowley, Malcolm. ‘‘The Devil a Monk Was He.’’ The New Republic 110, no. 18 (1 May 1940): 609. Crystal, David. The Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Curran, Trisha. ‘‘Variations on a Theme.’’ In The English Novel and the Movies, edited by Michael Klein and Gillian Parker. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981, 228– 234. (Concerns film versions of Of Human Bondage [1934, 1964].) Current Biography. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940– . Curtis, Anthony. Somerset Maugham. London: Macmillan, 1977. ———. The Pattern of Maugham: A Critical Portrait. London: Hamilton, 1974; Windsor, Berkshire: Profile Books, 1982. Curtis, Anthony, and John Whitehead, eds. W. Somerset Maugham: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Danielsson, Bengt. Gauguin in the South Seas. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966. Davies, Horton. A Mirror of the Ministry in Modern Novels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. Debrett’s Illustrated Peerage and Baronetage: Comprising Information concerning the Royal Family, the Peerage, and Baronetage. Edited by Charles Kidd and David Williamson. London: Debrett’s Peerage, 1992; London, Macmillan, 1992; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Dickson, Lovat. H. G. Wells. His Turbulent Life and Times. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Dictionary of American Biography (DAB). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931– . Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). Oxford: At the University Press, 1921– . Dobrinsky, Joseph. ‘‘The Dialects of Art and Life in Of Human Bondage.’’ Cahiers Victoriens & Edourdiens 22 (October 1985): 33–55. ———. Le Jeunesse de Somerset Maugham (1874–1903). Paris: Didier, 1976.
326
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
———. ‘‘Aspects Biographiques de’Oeuvre de Somerset Maugham:l’Enfance.’’ Etudes Anglaises 8 (October–December 1955): 299–312. Doner, Dean. ‘‘Spinoza’s Ethics and Maugham.’’ University of Kansas City Review 21 (June 1955): 261–69. Dottin, Paul. Le Theatre de William Somerset Maugham. Paris: Librarie Academique/ Perrin et Cie, 1937. ———. W.S. Maugham et sans Romans. 2d ed. Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1928. ———. ‘‘Le Realisme de Somerset Maugham.’’ La Revue de France (16 June 1926): 574–81. Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Rev ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Dreiser, Theodore. ‘‘As a Realist Sees It.’’ The New Republic 5, no. 60 (25 December 1915): 202–4. (Review essay of Of Human Bondage.) Eagle, Dorothy, and Hillary Carnell, eds. The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1977. Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Vantage Books, 1988. Ensor, R.C.K. England. 1870–1914. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1936. Epstein, Joseph. ‘‘Is It All Right to Read Somerset Maugham?’’ The New Criterion 4, no. 3 (November 1985): 1–13. Ervine, St. John. ‘‘Maugham the Playwright.’’ Life and Letters 11 (1935a). ———. ‘‘The Plays of W. Somerset Maugham.’’ Life and Letters 11 (March 1935b): 640–55. ———. The Theatre in My Time. London: Rich and Cowan, 1933. Ferris, Paul. ‘‘The Fountain of Youth Updated with the Cells of Unborn Lambs.’’ New York Times Magazine, 2 December 1973, 38–42, 44–49. (Concerns Paul Niehans and certain of his disciples.) Fielden, John Seward. ‘‘The Ibsenite Maugham.’’ Modern Drama 4 (September 1961): 138–51. ———. ’’Somerset Maugham on the Purpose of Drama.’’ Educational Theatre Journal 10 (October 1958): 218–22. ———. ‘‘ ‘Mrs. Beamish’ and The Circle.’’ Boston University Studies in English 2 (Summer 1956): 113–23. Fisher, Richard B. Syrie Maugham. Dallas: Duckworth, 1979. Flament, Albert. ‘‘Cap Ferrat—M. Somerset Maugham.’’ La Revue de Paris (5 October 1937): 944–49. (Concerns the writer’s visit to Villa Mauresque and an interview with Maugham.) Fleissner, Robert F. ‘‘Of Dickensian Bondage: A Probe.’’ Research Studies 48 (1980): 50–56. Fowler, W. B. British-American Relations: 1917–1918: The Role of Sir William Wiseman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Freedley, George, and John A. Reeves. A History of the Theatre. 3d ed. New York: Crown, 1968. Gassner, John, and Edward Quinn, eds. The Reader’s Encyclopedia of World Drama. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969. Gattis, Murrah. ‘‘A Renaissance of Respect for Maugham.’’ Los Angeles Times, ‘‘Calendar,’’ 15 July 1966, 60–62. Gill, Richard. ‘‘Was Uncle Willie a Source for Robin Maugham’s The Servant?’’ Journal of Modern Literature 8 (1980): 156–60.
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
327
Gordon, Caroline. ‘‘Notes on Chekhov and Maugham.’’ Sewanee Review 57 (Summer 1949): 401–10. Gosse, Edmund. Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments. London: William Heinemann, 1909. Gray, David. Smith: A Novel Based on the Play by W. Somerset Maugham. New York: Duffield, 1911. Greene, Graham. ‘‘Books of the Day: Spanish Gold.’’ Spectator (London) 154 (21 June 1935): 1076. Grotz, Arthur. ‘‘Maughams Erzahlung ‘The Outstation’: Ein Beitrag zur Gentleman Thematik.’’ Die Neureren sprachen 6 (1957). Gruber, Christian P. ‘‘Somerset Maugham’s Perfect Gentleman, 1912–1913.’’ Theatre Notebook 26 (1972): 151–58. Hair, David B., and Dennis E. Hensley. ‘‘A Comparative Look at W. S. Maugham and Jack London.’’ Jack London Newsletter 8 (1975): 114–18. Halliwell, Leslie. The Filmgoer’s Companion. Revised and Expanded Edition. Foreword by Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. Hannon, Leslie Fulton. Second Chance: The Life and Work of Dr. Paul Niehans. New York: W. H. Allen, 1972. Hart, James D., and Phillip W. Leininger, eds. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hart-Davis, Rupert, ed. The Letters of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962. Hartnoll, Phyllis, ed. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 3d ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Hassall, Christopher. Edwin Marsh, Patron of the Arts. London: Longmans, 1959. Hawkinson, Kenneth Steven. ‘‘Three Novels by W. Somerset Maugham: An Analysis Based on the Rhetoric of Wayne C. Booth.’’ Diss., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1986. Henry, William H., Jr. A French Bibliography of W. Somerset Maugham. Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1967. Hepburn, James G. The Author’s Empty Purse and the Rise of the Literary Agent. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Heywood, C. Two Printed Texts of Somerset Maugham’s Mrs. Craddock.’’ English Language Notes 5 (September 1967): 39–46. ———. ‘‘Somerset Maugham’s Debt to Madame Bovary and Miss Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife.’’ Etudes Anglaises 19 (January–March 1966): 64–69. Higdon, David Leon. ‘‘ ‘V. F.’ and Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Colonel’s Lady.’ ’’ Modern British Literature 3 (1978): 156–59. Holden, Philip. ‘‘W. Somerset Maugham’s Yellow Streak.’’ Studies in Short Fiction 29, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 575–82. Horgan, Paul. ‘‘Luncheon for Somerset Maugham.’’ American Scholar 62, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 98–102. Horne, Pierre L., and Mary Beth Pringle, eds. The Image of the Prostitute in Literature. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. Howe, Susanne. Novels of Empire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949. Huxley, Aldous, ed. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. London: William Heinemann, 1932. Innes, Christopher. ‘‘Somerset Maugham: A Test Case for Popular Comedy.’’ Modern Drama 30, no. 4 (December 1987): 549–59.
328
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Isherwood, Christopher. Exhumations: Stories, Articles, Verses. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Jacobs, Lewis. The Rise of the American Film. A Critical History. With an Essay, Experimental Cinema in America, 1921–1947. New York: Teachers College [Columbia University] Press, 1967. James, Edward T., ed. Notable American Women, 1607–1950. A Biographical Dictionary. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1971. Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. ‘‘W. Somerset Maugham: An Anglo-American Agent in Revolutionary Russia.’’ American Quarterly 28 (1976): 90–106. Jensen, Sven Arnold. William Somerset Maugham. Some Aspects of the Man and His Work. Oslo, Norway: Oslo University Press, 1957; rpt. Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1972. Jonas, Klaus W. ‘‘The Center for Maugham Studies.’’ Stechert-Hafner Book News 13, no. 5 (January 1959): 53–55. ———. The Gentleman from Cap Ferrat. With a Preface by W. Somerset Maugham. New Haven, CT: Center for Maugham Studies, 1956. ———. The Maugham Enigma. New York: Citadel Press, 1954. ———, ed. The World of Somerset Maugham. London: Peter Owen, 1959; London and New York: British Book Centre, 1959; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972. Kanin, Garson. Remembering Mr. Maugham. Foreword by Noel Coward. New York: Atheneum, 1966. Keating, P. J. The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction. London: Routledge, 1971. Kronenberger, Louis, ed. The Best Plays of 1957–1958. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958. Kruschwitz, H. ‘‘Rassenfrage in Maughams Alien Corn.’’ Zeitschrift fur Neusprachlichen Unterricht 38 (1939–1940a). ———. ‘‘Die Darstelung der Englischen Gesellschaft in Maughams Lustpiel Jack Straw.’’ Zeitschrift fur Neusprachlichen Unterricht 38 (1939–1940b). Kuner, Mildred C. ‘‘The Development of William Somerset Maugham.’’ Diss., Columbia University, 1953. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1953. 6651. Levey, Judith, and Agnes Greenhall, eds. The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Loss, Archie Krug, ed. W. Somerset Maugham. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1987; New York: Continuum, 1988. ———. Of Human Bondage: Coming of Age in the Novel. New York and London: Macmillan, 1989; Boston: Twayne, 1990. MacCarthy, Desmond. Humanities. Preface by Lord David Cecil. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. ———. Memories. Essays Selected by Robert Kee. London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1953. ———. Experience. London: Putnam, 1935. ———. ‘‘William Somerset Maugham. The English Maupassant.’’ [London] Nash’s Pall-Mall Magazine 93 (May 1933); rpt. separately, London, 1934; rpt. London: Norwood Editions, 1977. MacKenzie, Compton. My Life and Times: Octave Four. London: Chatto and Windus, 1965. Makolkin, Anna. Semiotics of Misogyny through the Humor of Chekhov and Maugham. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Mander, Raymond, and Joe Mitchenson. The Artist and the Theatre: The Story of the
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
329
Paintings Collected and Presented to the National Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham. London: William Heinemann, 1955a. ———. Theatrical Companion to Maugham. A Pictorial Record of the First Performances of the Plays of W. Somerset Maugham. London: Rockcliff; New York: Macmillan, 1955b. Mantle, Burns, ed. The Best Plays of 1932–1933. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1933. Maugham, Frederic Herbert. At the End of a Day. London: William Heinemann, 1954. Maugham, Robin. Conversations with Willie: Recollections of W. Somerset Maugham. London: Allen; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. ———. Somerset and All the Maughams. London: Longmans, Heinemann; New York: New American Library, 1966. Maugham, W. Somerset. A Traveller in Romance. Uncollected Writings, 1901–1964. Edited by John Whitehead. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1984. ———. Escape from the Shadows. London: Robin Clark, 1981. ———. The Magician. [1908] New York: Arno Press, 1977. ———. The Noble Spaniard: A Comedy. [1953] London: Evans Plays, 1970. ———. The Merry-Go-Round. [1905] London: William Heinemann, 1969. ———. Seventeen Lost Stories by W. Somerset Maugham. Edited by Craig V. Showalter. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. ———. Cakes and Ale; or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard [1930] and Twelve Stories. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967. ———. Liza of Lambeth. [1897] London: Penguin Books, 1967. ———. The Making of a Saint: A Romance of Medieval Italy. [1898] New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. ———. Theatre. [1937] New York: Bantam Books, 1959. ———. Mrs. Craddock. [1902] London: William Heinemann, 1955. ———. ‘‘The Perfect Gentleman.’’ Theatre Arts 39 (November 1955): 49–64. ———. Of Human Bondage. [1915] Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954. ———. The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953. ———. The Painted Veil. [1925] London: William Heinemann, 1951. ———. Catalina. A Romance. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948. ———. Here and There. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948. ———. Then and Now: A Novel. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1946. ———. The Razor’s Edge. [1943] Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1944. ———. The Hour Before the Dawn. A Novel. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1942. ———. Up at the Villa. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941. ———. Christmas Holiday. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939. ———. Princess September and the Nightingale. London: Oxford University Press, 1939. ———. Six Comedies. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1937. ———. Narrow Corner. [1932] Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1935. ———. The Collected Plays of Somerset Maugham. 3 vols. London: William Heinemann, 1931. ———. Ashenden: Or the British Agent. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1927. ———. The Letter. A Play in Three Acts. New York: George H. Doran, 1925. ———. Loaves and Fishes: A Comedy in Four Acts. London: William Heinemann, 1924.
330
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
———. Moon and Sixpence. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1919. ———. Landed Gentry: A Comedy in Four Acts. London: William Heinemann, 1913. ———. The Tenth Man. A Comedy in Three Acts. London: William Heinemann, 1913. ———. The Explorer. A Melodrama in Four Acts. [1912] Chicago: Dramatic, n.d.; New York: Carroll and Graf, 1991. ———. A Man of Honour. A Play. In Four Acts. [1903] Chicago: Dramatic, 1912. ———. The Bishop’s Apron: A Study in the Origins of a Great Family. London: Chapman and Hall, 1906. ———. The Hero. London: Hutchinson, 1901. McDorman, Kathryne S. ‘‘Changing Views of Empire: The General Imperial Themes of Somerset Maugham.’’ Research Studies 47 (1979): 145–53. McGrady, Patrick M. The Youth Doctors. New York: Coward-McCann, 1968. McInnes, Eilidh Margaret. St. Thomas’ Hospital. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1963. McIver, Claude Searcy. William Somerset Maugham: A Study of Technique and Literary Sources. 1936; rpt. Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1969; New York: Richard West, 1978. McKnight, Gerald. The Scandal of Syrie Maugham. London: W. H. Allen, 1980. Menard, Wilmon. ‘‘Somerset Maugham in Hollywood.’’ Michigan Quarterly Review 7 (1968): 207–10; rpt. in American Film (April 1979). ———. ‘‘Somerset Maugham and Paul Gauguin.’’ Michigan Quarterly Review 7 (1968): 227–32. ———. ‘‘Maugham’s Pacific.’’ Saturday Review (11 March 1967): 77–80. ———. The Two Worlds of Somerset Maugham. Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1965. Morgan, Ted. Maugham. [1979] New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. Mortimer, Raymond. ‘‘Re-Reading Mr. Maugham.’’ The New Statesman and Nation 8, no. 183 (25 August 1934): 243–44. Moskovit, Leonard. ‘‘Maugham’s ‘Outstation’: A Single, Serious Effect.’’ Colorado Studies 12 (1966): 107–14. Muller, Herbert Joseph. Modern Fiction: A Study of Values. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1937. See especially the chapter ‘‘Realism of the Center: Bennett, Galsworthy, Maugham.’’ Mustanoja, T. F. ‘‘Maugham Portrays Henry James.’’ Neophilologische Mitteilungen 52 (1951). Nagibin, Urii Markovich. [An Unwritten Story by Somerset Maugham]. Moscow: Raduga, 1988. (An English translation of the original Russian, Nenapisannyi Rasskaz Somerseta Moema.) Naik, M. K. W. Somerset Maugham. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969. Nemy, Enid. ‘‘Jerry Zipkin, Who Lunched and Listened, Is Dead at 80.’’ New York Times, 9 June 1995, B11:1–3. Nguyen, Hien Le. Doi Nghe Si. Westminster, CA: Van Nghe, 1993. (Biographies in Vietnamese of Maugham, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Balzac, and Walt Disney.) Nichols, Beverley. A Case of Human Bondage. London: Secker and Warburg, 1966. Nicoll, Allardyce. English Drama: 1900–1930. London: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Notable American Women, 1607–1950. A Biographical Dictionary. Ed. Edward T. James, et al. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Notable Names in the American Theatre. New and rev. ed. Clifton, NJ: J. T. White, 1976.
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
331
Palmer, R. Barton. ‘‘Artists and the Hacks: Maugham’s Cakes and Ale.’’ South Atlantic Review 46, no. 4 (November 1981): 54–63. Parker, R. B. ‘‘The Circle of Somerset Maugham.’’ In Shaw: Seven Critical Essays, edited by Norman Rosenblood, 36–50. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971. Pepper, Kathleen Daly. James Wilson Morrice. Intro. A. Y. Jackson. Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, 1966. Peschel, Enid Rhodes. ‘‘Callousness or Caring: Portraits of Doctors by Somerset Maugham and Richard Selzer.’’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 15, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 77–88. Pfeiffer, Karl Graham. W. Somerset Maugham: A Candid Portrait. Intro. Jerome Weidman. New York: W. W. Norton, 1959. Plomer, Henry R., et al. A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1668 to 1785. 1922; rpt. Oxford: Bibliographic Society, 1968. Plomer, Henry R., G. H. Bushnell, and E. R. McC. Dix. A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland, from 1726 to 1775. 1932; rpt. Oxford: Bibliographic Society, 1968. Pollock, John. ‘‘Somerset Maugham and His Work.’’ Quarterly Review 304, no. 650 (October 1966): 365–78. Pritchett, Victor Sawdon. ‘‘The Mixture As Before, by W. Somerset Maugham.’’ The New Statesman and Nation 19, no. 486 (15 June 1940): 750. Raphael, Frederic. Somerset Maugham. rev. ed. London: Cardinal Books, 1989. (Expansion and revision of W. Somerset Maugham and His World [1976].) ———. W. Somerset Maugham and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977. ———. ‘‘Fiction and the Medical Mode.’’ Journal of the Eighteen Nineties Society 6– 7 (1975–1976): 5–12. Redlin, Rosemarie. ‘‘Somerset Maugham: On a Chinese Screen.’’ Die Neueren Sprachen 13 (1964): 573–81. Rees, Leslie. ‘‘A Meeting with Somerset Maugham.’’ Meanjin Quarterly [University of Melbourne] 26 (1967): 452–56. Riesner, Dieter. ‘‘William Somerset Maugham.’’ In Englische Dichter der Moderne: Ihr Leben und Werk, edited by Rudolf Suhnel and Dieter Riesner, 355–720. Berlin: Schmidt, 1971. Rogal, Samuel J. A Guide to the Characters in the Drama and Fiction of William Somerset Maugham. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. ———. The Education of the British Literati: A Guide to Their Schools, Colleges, and Universities. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Ross, Woodburn O. ‘‘W. Somerset Maugham: Theme and Variations.’’ College English 8, no. 3 (December 1946): 115–23. Rothschild, Loren R., ed. The Letters of William Somerset Maugham to Lady Juliet Duff. Pacific Pallisades, CA: Rasselas Press, 1982. Sanders, Charles, et al. W. Somerset Maugham: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1970. (A number in the Annotated Bibliography Series on English Literature in Transition [1880–1920].) Savini, Giovanni. Das Weltbild in Maughams Dramen. Erlangen, 1939.
332
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sawyer, Newell Wheeler. The Comedy of Manners from Sheridan to Maugham. 1931; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1969. Schaffner, Randolph P. The Apprenticeship Novel: A Study of the ‘‘Bildungsroman’’ as a Regulative Type in Western Literature, with a Focus on Three Classic Representatives by Goethe, Maugham, and Mann. New York: Peter Lang, 1984. Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: Dell, 1961. Sharma, Kaushal Kishore. Tradition in Modern Novel Theory. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981. (Concerns Maugham, Joyce Cary, and E. M. Forster.) Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to Women Writers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ‘‘She Started the Great White Way in Decoration.’’ House and Garden 99 (April 1951): 94–95. (Re: Syrie Barnardo Wellcome Maugham.) Soong, Stephen C. ‘‘My Father and Maugham.’’ Trans. Diana Yu. Renditions: A ChineseEnglish Translation Magazine 3 (1974): 81–90. Sopher, Henry. ‘‘ ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’: The Literary Implications of Its Multilayered Structure.’’ Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 109–14. Spence, Robert. ‘‘Maugham’s Of Human Bondage: The Making of a Masterpiece.’’ Library Chronicle [University of Pennsylvania] 18 (Spring–Summer 1951): 104– 14. Stanford University Libraries. A Comprehensive Exhibition of the Writings of W. Somerset Maugham, Drawn from the Various Private Collections and Libraries, with a Preface by the Author [held] May 25 through August 1, 1958. Albert N. Bender Room, Stanford University Library. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Libraries, 1958. Stokes, Sewell. ‘‘W. Somerset Maugham.’’ Theatre Arts 29 (February 1945): 94–100. Stone, Lawrence. Road to Divorce. England, 1530–1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Stott, Raymond Toole. A Bibliography of the Works of W. Somerset Maugham. London: Kaye and Ward (1973); Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1973. ———. ‘‘Recollections of Somerset Maugham.’’ Soundings: Collections of the University Library, University of California, Santa Barbara 3, no. 1 (1971): 7–17. Strickland, Walter George. A Dictionary of Irish Artists. 2 vols. Dublin: Maunsel, 1913. Sutton, Graham. Some Contemporary Dramatists. London: L. Parsons, 1924. Swanson, William J. ‘‘Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Colonel’s Lady’: An Explication.’’ Chapbook £Southwestern State College] (1973–1974): 69. Tanaka, Mutsuo. Maugham—Ningenso to Bungaku. Tokyo: Asahi Shuppansha, 1970. (A general survey of Maugham and his works.) Tercentenary Handlist of English and Welsh Newspapers, Magazines, and Reviews. 1920; rpt. London: Dawson’s of Pall Mall, 1966. Thorne, J. O., ed. Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1962. Towne, Charles Hanson, et al. W. Somerset Maugham, Novelist, Essayist, Dramatist . . . with a Note on Novel Writing by Mr. Maugham. New York: George H. Doran, 1925; rpt. Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1976. Unwin, Philip. The Publishing Unwins. London: William Heinemann, 1972. Vidal, Gore. ‘‘Maugham’s Half and Half.’’ The New York Review of Books 37, no. 1 (1 February 1990): 39–44.
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
333
Vinson, James, ed. International Dictionary of Art and Artists. Volume 2: Artists. Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1990. Viswanath, G. V. ‘‘‘‘The Novels of Somerset Maugham.’’ Quest [Bombay], no. 23 (October–November 1959): 50–52. Ward, Richard Heron. William Somerset Maugham. London. G. Bles, 1937. Webster, H. T. ‘‘Possible Influence of George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn on Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.’’ Modern Language Review 7 (September 1946): 314. Webster’s New Geographical Dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1988. Weinreb, Ben, and Christopher Hibbert, eds. The London Encyclopaedia. Bethesda, MD: Adler and Adler, 1986. Weintraub, Stanley. Reggie: A Portrait of Reginald Turner. New York: George Brazilier, 1965. Wells, H. G. Experiment in Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1934. Wescott, Glenway. Images of Truth. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963. Whitehead, John. Maugham: A Reappraisal. London: Vision Press, 1987; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987. ———. ‘‘ ‘Whodunit’ and Somerset Maugham.’’ Notes and Queries 21 (1974): 327. Who Was Who. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1920– . Who Was Who in America. Chicago: Marquis-Who’s Who, 1963– . Who Was Who in the Theatre, 1912–1976: A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Directors, Playwrights, and Producers of the English-Speaking Theatre. Detroit: Gale Research, 1978. Whyte, Frederic. William Heinemann, a Memoir. Garden City, NY, 1929. Williams, Edwin Wallace. ‘‘Complications in the Plots of the Plays of W. Somerset Maugham.’’ Unpublished M.A. thesis, Stanford University, 1953. Williams, Orlo. ‘‘Books New and Old: Realistic Prose Drama.’’ National Review (London) 102 (May 1934): 676–83. Wilson, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Wilson, Edmund. ‘‘The Apotheosis of Somerset Maugham.’’ In Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties, 319–26. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950. Wright, Reg, ed. Early Modern Novelists. New York: M. Cavendish, 1989. (Overviews of the lives and works of Henry James, Maugham, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy.) Yevish, Irving A. ‘‘In Defense of Mr. Maugham.’’ Michigan Quarterly Review 12 (1973): 72–80. Zabel, Morton Dauwen. ‘‘A Cool Hand.’’ The Nation 152, no. 18 (3 May 1941): 534– 36. (Denounces Up at the Villa.)
Index Long names of persons and long titles of works appear in short form, while titles of persons have been omitted. Peripheral and incidental references, including nonsubstantive ones to spouses, have been included to underscore the wide range of Maugham’s acquaintances. Alternative names and nicknames (except to clarify and avoid confusion) have been omitted. Page references to main entries appear in italics. Aaron’s Rod, 129, 285 Abasa (‘‘Outstation’’), 205 Abbey Theatre, 43 Abbott, George, 304 Aberhalden, Emil, 194 Acaba, Count of (‘‘Point of Honour’’), 219 Academie Humbart, 128 Academie Julian, 156, 184 Academy, The, 285 Academy Awards, 34, 214 Academy of Dramatic Art, 266, 277, 307 Ackland, Rodney, 8 Addishaw, James (‘‘Point of Law’’), 220 Adenauer, Konrad, 194 ‘‘Adieu a Mon Ami Anglais,’’ 18 Adorable Julia, 128, 276 Aegean Intelligence Service, 143 ‘‘After Reading Burke,’’ 293 After Such Pleasure, 210 ‘‘Afternoon Party, An,’’ 132 Aga Khan, 41, 101
Against Revolution, 249 Age of Innocence, The, 308 Agosto, Don (‘‘Closed Shop’’), 25 Aguria, Pedro (‘‘Point of Honour’’), 219 Aguria, Soledad (‘‘Point of Honour’’), 219 Ah Kay (Narrow Corner), 191 Ah King, xv, 1, 4, 10, 28, 36, 49, 50, 173, 192, 255, 296 Ainley, Henry Hinchcliffe, 182 Alamari, Giorgio (Mask and the Face), 155 Alanson, Bertram, xiv, 1–2, 10, 83, 90, 111, 227, 284 Alanson Brothers, 2 Alanson, Lionel, 2 Alanson, Mabel Bremer, 2, 163 Albanese, Meggie, 41 Albert (‘‘Human Element’’), 97 Aldwych Theatre, 288 Alexander, George, 136, 137, 304 Algy (Aaron’s Rod), 285
336 Ali, Prince (‘‘Miss King’’), 181 Alice in Wonderland, 294 ‘‘Alien Corn, The,’’ 2, 27, 40, 111, 127, 226, 256 Alighieri, Dante, 105 Alix (‘‘His Excellency’’), 89 All in Good Time, 266 All the Conspirators, 104 Allerton, Fred (Explorer), 44–45 Allerton, George (Explorer), 44–45 Allerton, Lucy (Explorer), 44–45 Allhusen, Dorothy, 24, 263 Allhusen, Henry, 24, 263 Almond, Jack (‘‘Casual Affair’’), 18 Altogether, 40, 87 Alvarez, Pepe (‘‘Point of Honour’’), 219 Alvarez Quintero, Joaquin, 73 Alvarez Quintero, Serafin, 73 Alving, Oswald (Ghosts), 100 American Academy of Dramatic Arts, 113 American Bookman, 202 American Expeditionary Force (AEF), 316 American National Red Cross, 215, 231 American Play Company, 240 American Tragedy, An, 38 ‘‘Amiable Egoist,’’ The, 164 Amis, Kingsley, 260 Amy (‘‘Cousin Amy’’), 30 Amyntas (‘‘Choice of Amyntas’’), 22 Anastasia (Jack Straw), 120 Anastasia (Penelope), 120 Anderson, Daisy (East of Suez), 41 Anderson, Hans Christian, 251 Anderson, Henry (East of Suez), 41 Anderson, Maxwell, 228 Andrea (Making of a Saint), 147 Andreadi, Constantine (‘‘Hairless Mexican’’), 78 Andrews, Henry, 307 Androcles and the Lion, 250 Angelina (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 79, 80 Anglo-American Hospital, Nice, xviii Anglo-Chinese War, 94 Anna Alexandrovna (Road Uphill), 120 ‘‘Ant and the Grasshopper, The,’’ 2, 30, 42
INDEX
Ant Heap, The, 119 Apartment in Athens, 306 Apollo Theatre, 27 ‘‘Appearance and Reality,’’ 2–3, 31 Appearance and Reality, 2 Apple of the Eye, The, 306 Ardagh, Susan, 263 Ardsley, Charlotte (For Services Rendered), 52 Ardsley, Eva (For Services Rendered), 51 Ardsley, Leonard (For Services Rendered), 51 Ardsley, Lois (For Services Rendered), 52 Ardsley, Sydney (For Services Rendered), 52 Aren’t We All, 136 Argyll House, 26 Ariadne on Naxos, 214 Aristophanes, 249 Arkansas, University of, 26 Arlen, Atalanta, 3 Arlen, Michael, 3 Arms and the Man, 250 Arnold Bennett, 271 Arnold, Matthew, 54, 72 Arnold, Thomas, 268 Around the World in Eighty Days, 214 Arrol, Martin (Love in a Cottage), 140 Arrowsmith, 133 Art of Fiction, The, 74 Artemis to Actaeon, 308 Arthur, Jean, 91, 280 ‘‘Artistic Temperament of Philip Carey,’’ xvii, 20, 198, 261, 290 As You Like It, 294 Ascent of F6, The, 104 Ash Wednesday, 194 Ashcroft, Peggy, 12 Ashenden, xv, 3, 28, 70, 78, 88, 91, 115, 120, 129, 172, 181, 185, 248, 272, 281, 284, 300 Ashenden, Leonard, 3 Ashenden, William (Ashenden), 3, 49, 70, 78, 88, 114, 120, 181, 185, 281–282 Ashenden, William (Cakes and Ale), 3, 16, 98, 109 Ashenden, William (Moon and Sixpence), 3
INDEX
Ashenden, William (‘‘Sanatorium’’), 245 Ashford, Clarence, 83 Ashley, Caroline (Unattainable), 287 Ashley, Stephen (Unattainable), 287 Asquith, Herbert Henry, 153 Associated Talking Pictures, 35 Assumption of the Virgin, 74 Assunta (‘‘Lotus Eater’’), 139 Assunta (‘‘Salvatore’’), 243 At the End of the Day, 160 At the Moulin Rouge, 280 At the Races, 280 Ata (Moon and Sixpence), 183 Athelny, Betty (Of Human Bondage), 201 Athelny, Maria (Of Human Bondage), 201 Athelny, Thorpe (Of Human Bondage), 200 Athenaeum, 267 Atherton, Gertrude, 90 Atkin, Miss (‘‘Sanatorium’’), 245 Atkins, Henry (Liza of Lambeth), 135 Atkinson, R. F., 249 Atlantic Monthly, 74 Atlee, Clement, 239 Attorneys and Solicitors Acts, 168 Auburn, Rose (‘‘His Excellency’’), 89 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 104 Audlin, Dr. (‘‘Lord Mountdrago’’), 138 ‘‘Augustus,’’ 82, 293 Aurelius, Marcus Antonius, 190 Austen, Jane, 74 Austin, Albert E., 140 Authors’ Syndicate, 26 Autobiography of a Yogi, The, 101 Avenue Theatre, 144, 149, 234, 304, 317 Aynesworth, Allan, 24, 138(?)
Babbitt, 133 Baby, It’s Cold Inside, 214 Back, Barbara Nash, 4, 212, 267 Back, Ivor, 4, 295 ‘‘Back of Beyond, The,’’ 1, 4, 40 Back to Methuselah, 250 Backward Glance, A, 308 Bacon, Francis, 50
337
‘‘Bad Example, A,’’ xiii, 5, 34, 62, 203, 252, 253, 290 Bagehot, Walter, 54 Bagnold, Enid, 71 Baillie, James, 295 Baker and Taylor, 43 Baker, George, 251 Baker, Samuel, 260 Baker’s Dozen, A, 87 Baldwin, Stanley, 16, 310 Ballad of Reading Gaol, The, 309 Balliol College, Oxford, 27, 76, 192, 275 Balls, Somerset (Captain Nicholas), 301 Balzac, Honore de, 74 Banchory, Scotland, xiv, 5 Bancroft, Marie Effie, 127 Bancroft, Squire, 127 Bankhead, Tallulah, 228 Baptism, 75 Bar, The, 280 Barchester, Lady and Lord (Love in a Cottage), 140 Barfoot, Rhoda (Odd Woman), 69 Barlow, Davenport (Penelope), 213 Barlow, Montague, 261 Barlow, Ruth (‘‘Escape’’), 43 Barlow-Bassett, Reggie (Merry-GoRound), 179 Barnaby, Mike (‘‘Wash-Tub’’), 301 Barnaby, Mrs. (‘‘Wash-Tub’’), 301 Barnard, Edward (‘‘Fall of Edward Barnard’’), 48 Barnardo Homes, 6, 160 Barnardo, John Michaelis, 5 Barnardo Musical Boys, 6 Barnardo, Sarah Louise Elmslie, xii, 5, 105, 160 Barnardo, Thomas John, xii, 5–6, 160, 172 Barnes, Margaret Ayers, 251 Barnes, Reginald, 294 Baron, Elsie, 285 Barrack Room Ballads, 117, 179 Barres, Auguste Maurice, 75 Barrett, Elizabeth, 29 Barrett, Eva (‘‘Gigolo and Gigolette’’), 67 Barretts of Wimpole Street, The, 30
338
INDEX
Barrie, James M., 16, 59, 136, 294, 304 Barrow, Mr., 168 Barrymore, Ethel, 6, 28, 90, 121 Barrymore, Georgiana Drew, 6 Barrymore, Lionel, 90, 228 Barrymore, Maurice, 6 Bartle, Charles (‘‘Fortunate Painter’’), 54 Bartlett, Ethel (For Services Rendered), 52 Bartlett, Howard (For Services Rendered), 52 Baruch, Bernard, 194 Basil Dean Productions, 35 Bason, Fred, xv, 6 Bateaux a’Argenteuil, 235 Bath Club, 6–7 Bathers, 235 Battle, Charles Laurence (Bread Winner), 12, 262 Battle, Judy (Bread Winner), 12 Battle, Margery (Bread Winner), 12 Battle, Patrick (Bread Winner), 12 Battle of the Sexes, The, 279 Baum, Vickie, 119 Baxter, Anne, 230 Bayes, Gilbert, 249 Beachcomber, The, 7, 91, 296 Beardsley, Aubrey, 133 Beardsley, Mabel, 310 ‘‘Beast of Burden, The,’’ 202 ‘‘Beauty and the Professor,’’ 7, 293 ‘‘Beauty from Ashes,’’ 199 Beatty, Warren, 114 Beaverbrook, 270 Beaverbrook, William Maxwell, 7, 24, 36 Becque, Henri, 66, 100 Beddington, Samuel, 132 Beddington, Zillah Simon, 132 Beecham, Thomas, 33 Beerbohm, Constance, 7 Beerbohm, Eliza Draper, 7 Beerbohm, Henry Maximilian, 7–8, 73, 105, 133, 266, 283, 285, 310 Beerbohm, Julius Ewald, 7, 283 Before the Bombardment, 256 ‘‘Before the Party,’’ 8, 11, 18, 40 Behrman, S. N., xvi, 8, 30, 71, 84, 109, 111, 246, 249, 262
Bel Ami, 174 Belfast, University of, 43 Bell, Dr. (Love in a Cottage), 140 Bell, Vanessa, 315 Bella North, 152 Bellamy, Ralph, 190 Bellingham, Roger (Lady Frederick), 122 Belloc, Hilaire, 179 Bennett, Arnold, xiii, 8–9, 27, 37, 55, 65, 119, 171, 218, 260, 293 Bennett, Constance, 203 Benson, Arthur Christopher, 9 Benson, Edward Frederic, 9, 92, 93, 295 Benson, Edward White, 9 Benson, Robert Hugh, 9 Bercovici, Konrad, xvii, 295 Berenson, Bernard, 105 Beresford, J. D., 37 Berger, Lydia (Christmas Holiday), 23 Berger, Robert (Christmas Holiday), 23 Bergman, Ingrid, 28 Berkhamsted School, 76 Bernard, Jean, 265 Bernheim, Baron von (‘‘Good Manners’’), 71 Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo, 175–176 Berolles, Lady Frederick (Lady Frederick), 6, 104, 110, 121, 266 Berruguete, Sodina de (‘‘Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian’’), 224 Bertrand, Archie (John Cornelius), 301 Best of Dorothy Parker, The, 210 Bewitched, 251 Bible in Spain, The, 125 Bickers and Son, 123 Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, 128 Birds Fall Down, The, 307 Bishop, Charlie (‘‘Virtue’’), 297 Bishop, Ivy (‘‘Sanatorium’’), 245 Bishop, Margery Hobson (‘‘Virtue’’), 4, 297 Bishop’s Apron, The, xiii, 9, 33, 55, 136, 171, 217, 303 Bitter Sweet and Other Plays, 31 Bitterns, The, 306 Black and White, 132, 164 Black, Douglas, 9–10 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 307
INDEX
Black Mischief, 303 Black Shield of Falworth, The, 154 Blackbridge, John (‘‘Portrait of a Gentleman’’), 221 Blair-Kennedy, John (South Sea Bubble), 31 Blake, Fred (Narrow Corner), 190 Blake, Jim (Narrow Corner), 190 Blakeston, Jim (Liza of Lambeth), 135 Blakeston, Mrs. (Liza of Lambeth), 135 Bland, Alfred (‘‘Alien Corn’’), 2 Bland, George (‘‘Alien Corn’’), 2 Bland, Harry (‘‘Alien Corn’’), 2 Bland, Miriam (‘‘Alien Corn’’), 2 Bleane, Harry (Our Betters), 204 Blenkinsop (Gentleman in the Parlour), 65 Blenkinsop, James (Mrs. Dot), 65, 189 Blind Bow-Boy, The, 294 Bliss, Judy (Hay Fever), 274 Blissard, Colonel (‘‘Making of a Millionaire’’), 146 Blissard, Janet (‘‘Making of a Millionaire’’), 146 Blithe Spirit, 30 Bloomsbury Group, 315 Blow Up a Storm, 113 Blue Grotto, 17 Board of Northern Lighthouses, 267 Board of Trade, 72 Boer War, 10, 24, 44, 87, 88, 137, 149, 152, 178, 223, 263, 266, 289 Bollin, Madame (‘‘Winter Cruise’’), 312 Bolton, Guy Reginald, 276 Bolton, Harry (Redburn), 93 Bond, James, 49 Bones and Joints, 264 Boni and Liveright, 228 Bonnat, Leon, 280 ‘‘Book-Bag,’’ 1, 10, 40 Book-of-the-Month Club, 19 Book of the Queen’s Doll House Library, The, 223 Book Society, 59, 301 Books and Characters, 268 Books and You, xvi, 11 Books on Tape, 87, 230, 291
339
Booth Theatre (New York), 91, 280 Boothe, Ann Clare Snyder, 140 Boothe, William F., 140 Borcelli, Count (‘‘String of Beads’’), 269 Borgia, Caesar, 106, 278 Born in Exile, 69 Born Yesterday, 113 Borneo, 11, 42, 50, 204, 318 Borrow, George, 50, 125 Boss, The, 251 Boswell, James, 50, 113 Boucher, Francois, 234 Boucicault, Dionysius George, 11, 188, 213, 256, 287, 294, 304 Boucicault, Dionysius Lardner, 11 Bougainville, Louis de, 243 ‘‘Boule de Suif,’’ 174 Bourchier, Arthur, 63, 275 Boxer Rebellion, 274 Boyd, Susie (Magician), 145 Boyleston, Clifford (‘‘Creative Impulse’’), 31 Brabazon, Colonel (‘‘Facts of Life’’), 47 Brackley, Robert (Man of Honour), 150 Bradley, Francis Herbert, 2 Bradley, James (Sheppey), 252 Bradley, Louisa (Razor’s Edge), 231 Bradley, Mr. (Razor’s Edge), 231 Bradley, Myron (Razor’s Edge), 231 Bradley, Templeton (Razor’s Edge), 231 Brahman, 230 Brand, 99 Brandolini, Filippo (Making of a Saint), 147 Brandon, Dr. (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 80 Branscombe, Robert (‘‘Cupid and the Vicar of Swale’’), 33 Braque, Georges, 194, 217 Bread-Winner, The, xv, 12, 87, 100, 137, 262 Bredon, Captain (‘‘Neil MacAdam’’), 192 Bremer, Adrian von (Jack Straw), 108 Breton, Augustus (‘‘Good Manners’’), 70 Brevold (‘‘Pool’’), 221 Brice, Fanny, 210 Bride of Frankenstein, The, 278 Brideshead Revisited, 303
340
INDEX
Bridgenorth, Mrs. Reginald (Getting Married), 136 Brieux, Eugene, 99 Bright, Addison, 12 Bright, Reginald Golding, 12 Brighton Rock, 76 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 85, 109, 239 British Drama League, 73 British Foreign Service, 299–300 British Intelligence Service, 161, 172 British Library of Information, 158 British Ministry of Information, 56, 73, 95, 103, 173 British Museum, 62, 72, 106 British Repertory Theatre Festival, 35 British Shoe Corporation, 250 Brittle, Captain, 260 Brokaw, George Tuttle, 140 Bronson, Olive (‘‘Footprints in the Jungle’’), 50 Bronson, Reggie (‘‘Footprints in the Jungle’’), 50 Bronte, Emily, 74 Brooke, Jocelyn, 143 Brooke, Rupert, 153 Brooks, John Ellingham, xii, xv, 9, 12– 13, 17, 66, 92, 93, 138, 143, 170, 310 Brothers Karamazov, The, 74 Brough, Fanny, 195 Broughton, George, 98 Brown (‘‘His Excellency’’), 89 Brown, John, 226 Brown University, 214 Browne, Graham, 274 Browne, Thomas, 72 Brownie, 69 Browning, Robert, 72 Brownley, Dr. (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 79, 80 Bruce, Arudel (Love in a Cottage), 139 Bruce, Kate Mary Maugham, xviii, 13, 152, 159, 163, 165, 166 Bruce, Robert Charles, 13 Bruce, Sybil (Love in a Cottage), 136, 139 Brunot, Rene (Moon and Sixpence), 183 Buckmaster, Herbert, 29
Buddha, 65, 101, 191 Bulfinch, Mrs. (‘‘Creative Impulse’’), 31 Bull, Ole Borneman, 99 Bullough, Sylvia (Unknown), 289 ‘‘Bum, The,’’ 13, 30 Burdon, Arthur (Magician), 145 Burgess, Thomas, 239 Burial of Count Orgaz, 75 ‘‘Buried Talent, The,’’ 13 Burke, Billie, 123 Burke, Edmund, 293 Burma, 14, 142, 155 Burne-Jones, Edward Coley, 98 Burnet, John, 249 Burnham, Daniel, 249 Burns, Robert, 41 Burnt Out Case, A, 76 Burroughs, Silas, 305 Burroughs, Wellcome, and Company, 305 Burton, Edward Hyde (‘‘Friend in Need’’), 58 Burton, Lenny (‘‘Friend in Need’’), 58 Bush, Annie (Merry-Go-Round), 178 Bush, James (Man of Honour), 149 Bush, James (Merry-Go-Round), 178 Bush, Jenny (Man of Honour), 149, 304 Bush, Jenny (Merry-Go-Round), 178 Bush, Mrs. (Man of Honour), 149 Bush, Mrs. (Merry-Go-Round), 178 Butcher, Cyril, 193 Butler, Captain (‘‘Honolulu’’), 94 Butler, R.A.B., 20 Butterfield, Owen and Mrs. (Love in a Cottage), 140 Byron, Lord, 10, 44, 103, 196, 219 Bystander, 54 By the Ionian Sea, 70 Bynner, Witter, 129 Byring (‘‘His Excellency’’), 89 Caedmon Records, 182 Caesar and Cleopatra, 279 Caesar’s Wife, xv, 15, 27, 41, 87, 240 Caine, T.H.H., 286 Cakes and Ale, xv, 15–17, 28, 37, 41, 59, 65, 68, 70, 73, 81, 98, 109, 112, 115, 129, 135, 173, 214, 271, 291, 300, 306, 309
INDEX
Cakes and Ale and Twelve Short Stories, 222 Calder, Robert Lorin, 92 Calderon, Pedro, 36 Cambridge Union Debating Society, 159 Cambridge University, 12, 26, 53, 104, 149, 153, 157, 164, 191, 277, 313 Cambridge University Press, 317 Camel’s Back, The, xv, 17, 216 Cameron, Septimus (‘‘Pro Patria’’), 223 Camoens, Luis de, 191 Campbell (‘‘Raw Material’’), 229 Campbell, Alan, 210 Campbell, Beatrice, 286 Campbell, Mr. (‘‘Sanatorium’’), 245 Campion (‘‘Yellow Streak’’), 318 Canadian The, 17, 90 Candida, 250 Cannan, Gilbert, 37 Canterbury Cathedral, 116, 159, 253 Canton, Barbara (‘‘Promise’’), 224 Canton, Robert (‘‘Promise’’), 224 Cape, Jonathan, 62 Capri, xii, xiii, 17, 93, 105, 138, 143, 161, 176, 217 Captain Nicholas, 301 Carbuccia, Horace de, 18, 24, 110 Cardew, William (Home and Beauty), 92 Cardew-Lowndes, Victoria (Home and Beauty), 92 Carey, Louisa (Of Human Bondage), 199 Carey, Philip (Of Human Bondage), 35, 64, 75, 89, 93, 114, 117, 175, 197, 198– 201, 241, 264 Carey, William (Of Human Bondage), 163, 199, 201 Carlisle, Admiral (Lady Frederick), 122 Carlisle, Rose (Lady Frederick), 122 Carlton Club, 6 Carmencita (‘‘Closed Shop’’), 26 Carmona, Manuel (‘‘Hairless Mexican’’), 78 Carnival, 143 Caroline, xv, 11, 172, 271, 287, 294 Carolus-Duran, Charles, 197 Carr, Jack (‘‘Flotsam amd Jetsam’’), 50 Carreon, Pilar (‘‘Romantic Young Lady’’), 237
341
Carrington, Doris, 268 Carroll, Diahann, 114 Carruthers, Humphrey (‘‘Human Element’’), 97 Carter, George (‘‘Episode’’), 42 Carter, Grace (‘‘Episode’’), 42 Carter, Mrs. (‘‘Episode’’), 42 Cartwright, Theo (‘‘Footprints in the Jungle’’), 50 Cartwright, Mrs. (‘‘Footprints in the Jungle’’), 50 Case of Human Bondage, A, xviii, 193 Case of Jean Calas, The, 160 Casino Royale, 49 Cass Timberlane, 133 Castillyon, Grace (Merry-Go-Round), 178, 179 Castillyon, Mrs. (Merry-Go-Round), 179 Castillyon, Paul (Merry-Go-Round), 178, 179 ‘‘Casual Affair,’’ 18, 31 Casuarina Tree, The, xv, 8, 11, 18–19, 28, 49, 52, 130, 173, 205, 206, 255, 318 Catalina (Ibsen), 99 Catalina (Maugham), xvii, 19, 26, 36, 48, 87, 116, 155, 173, 254, 262 Catastrophe, The, 115 Cathedral, 300 Cavendish, Fanny (Theatre Royal), 274 Caypor, Grantley (‘‘Traitor’’), 281–282 Caypor, Mrs. (‘‘Traitor’’), 281–282 Cedar, Gwen (For Services Rendered), 52 Cedar, Wilfred (For Services Rendered), 52 Celebrity at Home, The, 98 Celebrity’s Daughter, The, 98 Center for Maugham Studies, xvii, xviii, 19–20 Center Group Theatre, 113 Cervantes, Miguel de, 36, 126, 154 Cezanne, Paul 156, 197, 218 Chalford, Adolphus (Noble Spaniard), 196 Chamberlain, Neville, 20, 153, 160 Chambrun, Jacques, xvi, xvii, 3, 20, 177, 279 Champion, Gower, 91, 280
342
INDEX
Champion-Cheney, Arnold (Circle), 24 Champion-Cheney, Catherine (Circle), 24, 313 Champion-Cheney, Clive (Circle), 24, 127, 279 Champion-Cheney, Elizabeth (Circle), 25 Channel Road, The, 316 Channon, Harry, 20 Channon, Henry, xvi, 20–21, 33, 234 Channon, Honour Guinness, 20 Channon, Vesta Westover, 20 Chaplin, Charles Spencer, 21 Chapman and Hall, 9, 98, 149, 303 Chapman, Emily (Smith), 257 Chapman, Louvaina, 273 Characters and Commentaries, 268 Charing, Roger (‘‘Escape’’), 43 Charles II, 138 Charming Sinners, 21, 28, 90 Charterhouse School, 7 Charvin, Jean (‘‘Man with a Conscience’’), 150 Chatterton, Ruth, 28, 72 Chatto and Windus, 271 Cheaper by the Dozen, 285 Cheevers, Harold, 300 Chekov, Anton, 99, 108, 220 Cherriton, Guy (‘‘Lady Habart’’), 123 Cherry Orchard, The, 108 Chester, Henry (‘‘Sanatorium’’), 245 Chesterton, G. K., 179, 295 Chiang K’ai-shek, 22 Chiaramello, Annette, 21 Chiarelli, Luigi, 21–22, 155 Chicago, University of, 294 Childe Harold, 103 Childe’s Garden of Verses, A, 267 China, 22 ‘‘Choice of Amyntas, The,’’ 22, 203, 261 Choice of Kipling’s Prose, A, 118 Chrichton, Avice (Theatre), 277 Christ Church, Oxford, 20 Christ in Majesty, 270 Christian, The, 286 Christ’s Agony in Gethsemane, 75 Christessen, Erik (Narrow Corner), 191 Christie’s, 261
Christmas Holiday, xvi, 23, 37, 56, 57, 91 Christopher and His Kind, 104 Churchill, 270 Churchill, John 24 Churchill, Randolph Henry, 24 Churchill, Winston, xviii, 7, 20, 23–24, 54, 137, 153, 160, 194, 239, 240, 255, 263 Circle, The, xiv, 18, 24–25, 27, 43, 90, 127, 173, 187, 213, 249, 269, 279, 313 Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily, 82 City Lights, 21 City of London Hospital, 284 City of London School, 211 Civil Liabilities Commission, 236 Civil Liabilities Military Service Department, 211 Clare College, Cambridge, 246 Clare, John, 239 Clark, Ernie (Hour Before the Dawn), 97 Clark, Knobby (Hour Before the Dawn), 97 Clark, Mrs. (Hour Before the Dawn), 97 Clark University, 8 Clarke, Harold (‘‘Back of Beyond’’), 4 Claude, Ada (Lady Frederick), 122 Clay, Thornton (Our Betters), 204 Cleves, Princesse, de, 15 Clibborn, Clara (Hero), 88 Clibborn, Mary (Hero), 87, 289 Clibborn, Reginald (Hero), 88 Clinton, Amy (‘‘Bad Example’’), 5 Clinton, James (‘‘Bad Example’’), 5 Clore, Charles, 250 ‘‘Closed Shop, The,’’ 25–26, 30 Clutton (Of Human Bondage), 64, 198 Cobb, Daniel, 228 Cobbett, Henry (Landed Gentry), 126 Cocteau, Jean, 265 ‘‘Code of a Gentleman, The,’’ 221 Colby, Robert (Tenth Man), 275–276 Colefax, Arthur, 26 Colefax, Sybil, 26, 104, 310–11, 315 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 239, 240, 242 Collected Poems (Brooke), 153 Collected Poetry (Parker), 210 Collected Stories (Parker), 210
INDEX
Colles, William Morris, xiii, 26–27, 45, 290 Collier’s Magazine, 288 Collins, Charles Allston, 72 Collins, Mrs., 72 Collins, William, the younger, 72 Collins, William Wilkie, 72 ‘‘Colonel’s Lady, The,’’ 2, 27, 31, 226 Colton, John, 40, 228 Colvin, Sidney, 244, 267 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 274 Columbia Pictures, 90, 91, 181, 230, 280 Columbia Records, 279 Columbia University, xvii, 7, 8, 10, 26, 215, 293 Comedie-Francaise, 214, 277 Comedy Theatre, 188, 212, 256 Commander of the Legion of Honour, 173 Common Reader, The, 315 Companion of Honour, 173, 237, 255 Companion of Literature, 54, 240 Complete Collection of the Statutes and Rules, 168 Complete Poker Player (‘‘Portrait of a Gentleman’’), 221 Complete Short Stories (Maugham), 40, 87, 142, 151, 155 Compton, Edward, 27, 143 Compton, Virginia (Fay), 15, 24, 27–28, 143 Compton, Virginia Francis, 27 Conder, Charles, 184 Confidential Agent, The, 76 Congreve, William, 72 Connolly, Cyril, xvi, 28, 109 Conrad, Joseph, 61, 62, 86, 179, 218, 290 Constant Wife, The, xv, 21, 27, 28–29, 30, 72, 90, 100, 173, 249 ‘‘Consul, The,’’ 29 Contemporaries, 222 Contemporary Review, The, 54 Contribution on Interpreting School Literature, A, 111 Convention of Peking, 93 Convers, Edward (‘‘Buried Talent’’), 13
343
Conversations with Willie, 166 Conway, George (East of Suez), 41 Cooper, Allen (‘‘Outstation’’), 204 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 6 Cooper, Gladys, 29, 91, 131, 207, 241, 279 Cooper, Jim (Sheppey), 253 Cooper, Sally (Liza of Lambeth), 135 Cooper, Violet Kemble, 17 Coralie, Madame (‘‘Closed Shop’’), 26 Cordell, Richard, 198, 283 Corelli, Marie, 263 Cormack, Bartlett, 207 Cormon, Fernand, 280 Cornell, Katharine, 29–30, 132, 154 Cornell University, 26 Cornhill, The, 293 Cornish, Dr. (Unattainable), 287 Corot, Jean Baptiste, 255 Cosmopolis, xiii, 203, 224 Cosmopolitan, 2, 10, 13, 30, 215 Cosmopolitans, xvi, 2, 13, 25, 30, 38, 42, 43, 55, 57, 58, 65, 76, 80, 87, 91, 100, 112, 139, 141, 151, 176, 182, 186, 219, 221, 224, 229, 243, 259, 268, 269, 295, 301 Cottman, Stella (‘‘Gigolo and Gigolette’’), 67 Cottman, Syd (‘‘Gigolo and Gigolette’’), 67 Count Your Blessings, 262 Counterattack, 246 Courbet, Gustave, 218 Court Theatre, 73, 171 Court Theatre, The, 143 Courtney, W. L., 54, 149 ‘‘Cousin Amy,’’ 30 Cousin Rosamund, 307 Coutras, Dr. (Moon and Sixpence), 183 Coventry Cathedral, 270 Coward, Noel, 29, 30–31, 137, 194, 274, 311 Craddock, Bertha (Mrs. Craddock), 93, 187 Craddock, Edward (Mrs. Craddock), 93, 187 Craig, George (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 80 Craig, Mr. (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 79
344
INDEX
Craig, Mrs. (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 79 Crane, Stephen, 218 Crawford, Joan, 90, 228 Crawfurd, Oswald, 98 Crazy Pavements, 193 ‘‘Creative Impulse, The,’’ 31, 40, 256 Creatures of Circumstance, xvii, 2, 18, 27, 31, 42, 50, 79, 118, 148, 185, 219, 237, 245, 288, 312, 314 Criminal Law Amendment Act, xii, xiv, xviii, 32, 85, 93 Criterion Theatre, 104, 121, 137 Critique of Judgment, 293 Cronshaw, J. (Of Human Bondage), 33, 200 Crosbie, Leslie (‘‘Letter’’), 130 Crosbie, Leslie (Letter), 29, 30, 35, 40, 131, 132 Crosbie, Robert (‘‘Letter’’), 130 Crosbie, Robert (Letter), 35, 132 Crowley, Edward [Aleister], xiii, 4, 32– 33, 114, 144, 171 Crowley, Julia (Explorer), 45, 50 Crowley, Nellie (Explorer), 46 Crowley, Rose Kelly, 32, 114 Crucifixion (El Greco), 75 Crucifixion (Rouault), 238 Cubism, 217 Culver, Mrs. (Constant Wife), 29 Culver, Roland, 42 Cunard, Bache, 33 Cunard, Emerald, 20, 33 Cunard Lines, 226 Cunard-White Star Line, 227 Cunningham, Rex (Unattainable), 287 ‘‘Cupid and the Vicar of Swale,’’ 33, 136 Currey, Henry, 264 Curtis, Anthony, 251 Curzon, Frank, 29 Cutler, Kate, 195 Cyrano de Bergerac, 137–38 D’Artagnon (Three Musketeers), 137 D’Orsay, Alfred, 63 D’Orsi, Checco (Making of a Saint), 147 D’Orsi, Matteo (Making of a Saint), 147 D’Orsi, Orso (Making of a Saint), 147 D’Usseau, Jead, 210
Daily Express (London), 7, 236, 300, 314 Daily Mail (London), xvi, 10, 49, 121, 266 Daily Mirror (London), 4 Daily Telegraph, 285 ‘‘Daisy,’’ xiii, 34, 203, 290, 309 Dall’Aste, Giorgio (Making of a Saint), 147–148 Dall’Aste, Giulia (Making of a Saint), 147 Dallas-Baker, Herbert (Smith), 257 Dallas-Baker, Rose (Smith), 257 Dame of the British Empire, 274, 294, 307 Dangerous, 35 Dark Angel, 154 Dark Forest, The, 300 ‘‘Dark Woman, The’’, 114 Dark Tower, The, 316 Darley, Isabelle, 248 Darling, Mrs. (Peter Pan), 136 Darrell, Larry (Razor’s Edge), 22, 86, 88, 102, 105, 173, 216, 230–33, 235 Das Vermachtnis Kains, 241 Daubeny, Peter, 203 Daubernoon, Kate (‘‘Point of Law’’), 220 Daubernoon, Mrs. (‘‘Point of Law’’), 220 Daubernoon, Roger (‘‘Point of Law’’), 220 Daubernoon, Robert (‘‘Point of Law’’), 220 Dauncey, Margaret (Magician), 145 David Copperfield, 74 Davidson, Alfred (‘‘Rain’’), 229 Davidson, Mrs. (‘‘Rain’’), 229 Davin, Guy Albert, xv, 23 Davis, Bette, 34–35, 90, 132, 154, 198 Dawson-Scott, Catharine, 211–12 Day-Lewis, Cecil, 260 ‘‘De Amicitia,’’ 35, 203 De Bathe, Hugo Gerald, 127 De Gaulle, Charles, 194 De Leon, Louis, 36 De Mille, Cecil B., 90, 107 De Profundis, 309 De Valero, Blasco Suarez (Catalina), 19 De Valero, Manuel (Catalina), 19 De Valero, Martin (Catalina), 19
INDEX
De Vries, Dolly (Theatre), 277 Dean, Basil, 28, 35, 41, 228 Dearin, Andre, 156 Death and Taxes, 210 Death of a Harlequin, The, 217 Death of Dickie Draper, The, 304 Decker, Pierre, 272 Declaration of Independence, 231 Decline and Fall, 303 ‘‘Decline and Fall of the Detective Story, The,’’ 28, 293 Delineator, 177 Dell, Robert, 57 Della Cercola, Flora (Our Betters), 204 Della Cercola, Marino (Our Betters), 204 Delmotte, Henri, 175 Demonstrations of Anatomy, 264 Dempsey, Jack, 118 Dennis, Miss (Home and Beauty), 92 Denver Post, 177 Deputy Was King, A, 266 Der Don Juan von Kalomea, 241 Derain, Andre, 238 Deserted Altar, The, 222 Designer, The, 281 Devil’s Disciple, The, 250 Dial, The, 249 Dialogues, The, 222 Dickens, Charles, 63, 74 Dickinson, C., 130 Die Messalinen Wiens, 241 Die West als Wille und Vorstellung, 246 Dietz, Howard, 229 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 121, 266 Dillon, Frances, 275 Discharged Prisoners Aid Society, 247 Dishonored Lady, 251 Divorcee, The, 90 Dixon, William, xi, 168 Do Re Mi, 113 Dobrinsky, Joseph, 217 Doctor Faustus, 19 Doctor’s Dilemma, The, 250 Doctor’s Hospital, New York, 85, 308 ‘‘Dodo,’’ 9 Dodsworth, 133 Dolfuss, Englebert, 291 Doll’s House, A, 12, 99, 100
345
Dolly the English Barmaid, 280 Don Fernando, xvi, 35–36, 75, 76, 93, 153, 154, 171, 238, 262 Don Juan, 44 Don Manuel (‘‘Closed Shop’’), 26 Donaldson (‘‘Straight Flush’’), 268 Donne, John, 72 Don’t Take It to Heart, 262 ‘‘Door of Opportunity, The,’’ 1, 36–37, 40 Doran, George H., xv, 18, 24, 28, 37, 41, 45, 48, 132, 134, 182, 187, 190, 198, 203, 207, 281, 284, 289 Dorante, Count (Perfect Gentleman), 215 Dore, Paul Gustave, 157, 169 Dorimene, Countess (Perfect Gentleman), 215 Doris (‘‘Force of Circumstances’’), 52 Dos Palos, Duchess de (‘‘Romantic Young Lady’’), 237 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 74 Dottin, Paul, 81 Doubleday and Company, xv, 9, 16, 19, 36, 37, 59, 74, 103, 137, 154, 220, 230, 241, 278, 316 Doubleday, Doran, and Company, 3, 11, 23, 37, 51, 56, 64, 95, 256, 268, 269, 276, 282, 290–91, 293 Doubleday, Ellen, 37 Doubleday, Frank Nelson, 37 Doubleday, Nelson, xvi, xvii, 10, 37–38, 173, 177, 210, 222, 227, 247, 295, 307 Douglas, Alfred, 310 Douglas, John Sholto, 309–10 Douglas, Norman, 92 Dover College, Kent, 157, 159, 164 Doverdale, Lady, 312 Down There on a Visit, 104 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 302 Dr. Fischer of Geneva, 76 Drama, 143 Dramatic Criticism (Grein), 77 Dramatic Publishing Company, 45, 107, 121, 149, 188, 213, 256, 275 Dramatic Works (Maugham), 87 Draper, Constance, 283 ‘‘Dream, The,’’ 30, 38
346
INDEX
Dreams Fade, 311 Dreiser, Theodore, 38–39, 198 Drew, John, 256 Driffield, Amy (Cakes and Ale), 16 Driffield, Edward (Cakes and Ale), 16, 81, 301, 306 Driffield, Rosie (Cakes and Ale), 16, 112, 115 Du Cane, Edmund, 42 Du Maurier, Gerald, 136 Duel in the Sun, 154 Duffield, 144 Dufy, Raoul, 156, 238 Duke of York’s Theatre, 11, 59, 123, 126, 136, 138, 195, 294 Duke, Vernon, 228 Dunant, Jean, 233 Dunn, Mary Chavalita, 12 Durand-Ruel Gallery, 235, 238 Durant, Gwendolyn (Bishop’s Apron), 9 Durham Grammar School, 300 Durham, Marie-Louise (Constant Wife), 28 Duse, Eleanora, 286 Dutch Art Chronicle, 76 Dynasts, The, 73, 81 Eagles, Jeanne, 40, 90, 132, 154, 228 Ealing Studios, 35 Earl, Julian Romer, 165 Earl, Sebastian, xv, 165 Early Years of Alec Waugh, The, 302 East and West, 40, 87 East End Mission, 5 East India Company, 101, 254, 258 East of Suez, xv, 22, 35, 40–41, 43, 173, 240 Eastman, Max, 154 Eastward Ha!, 214 Ecoles de Beaux Arts, 156 Eden, Anthony, 95 Edinburgh Review, 267 Edinburgh, University of, 41, 192, 267, 305 Edman, Erwin, 7 Edmund Campion, 303 Edward VII, xiv, 127 Edward VIII, 256, 310, 311
Edwin (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 79, 80 ‘‘Egerton, George,’’ 12 Egypt, 41 Egypt, 251 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 10 Elfenbein (Gentleman in the Parlour), 111 Elias, Edith, 182 Eliot, George, 54 Eliot, T. S., xv, 256 Elizabeth II, vii, xvii, 237, 239, 311 Elizabeth and Essex, 268 Elizabeth, Lady (‘‘Good Manners’’), 71 Elizabeth, Queen, 114 Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, 220 Elliott, Maxine, 279 Ellis, George Viner, 264 Ellis Henry Havelock, 295 Ellis, Mortimer (‘‘Round Dozen’’), 238 Elmer Gantry, 133 Eminent Authors, Inc., 90 Eminent Victorians, 267 Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 300 Emperor and Galilean, 99 Empire Theatre, 59 Enchanted Cottage, The, 154 Encore, 42, 67, 262 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 140 End of the Affair, The, 76 ‘‘End of the Flight, The,’’ 30, 42 Enemy of the People, An, 99 England Expects, 119 English Review, 98 Ennismore, Dr. (Sheppey), 253 Enough Rope, 210 Ensheim, Father (Razor’s Edge), 230 Enver Pasha (‘‘Hairless Mexican), 78 ’’Envoi,’’ 284 ‘‘Episode, The,’’ 31, 42–43 Epstein, Jacob, 222 Erdmann, Captain (‘‘Winter Cruise’’), 312 Ervine, St. John Greer, 43, 133, 274 ‘‘Escape, The,’’ 30, 43 Espinal, Vicente de, 36 Espinel, Paco (‘‘Gigolo and Gigolette’’), 67 Esquire, 215
INDEX
Etchingham, Anne (Tenth Man), 276 Etchingham, Francis (Tenth Man), 276 Ethan Frome, 308 Ethel (‘‘Pool’’), 221 Ethica, 199 Eton College, 28, 49, 83, 95, 114, 142, 145, 166, 167, 188, 189, 204, 256, 277 Euthanasia, 242 Evand Brothers, 195 Evans, C. S., 58 Eve, Justice, 160 Evening News, 271 Evening Standard (London), 7 Evensong, 119 Everybody’s, 177 Excavations, 294 Exemplary Theatre, The, 73 Experience, 143 Explorer, The, xiii, xiv, 8, 12, 27, 43–45, 45–46, 50, 87, 90, 106, 118, 171, 266, 299 Extraordinary Women, 143 Eye Witness, 142 Fabian Society, 250, 306 Facade, 255 Face of a Stranger, 152 Faces My Fortune, 152 ‘‘Facts of Life, The,’’ 2, 27, 47, 182, 226 Fafner (‘‘Miss King’’), 181 Fairbanks, Douglas, 120, 190 Fairfield, Charles, 307 Fairfield, Isabella, 307 ‘‘Faith,’’ 47–48, 203, 261 ‘‘Fall of Edward Barnard, The,’’ 40, 48, 284 Falliers, Armand (‘‘Creative Impulse’’), 31 Falloux, Carrie (Theatre), 277 Family Fortune, A, 304 Family Portrait, A, 306 Famous Players, 90, 123 Famous Players-Lasky, 90, 107 Fane, Kitty (Painted Veil), 29, 207–8 Fane, Walter (Painted Veil), 160, 207–8 ‘‘Fannings, The,’’ 202 Far from the Madding Crowd, 81 Farley, Jim (‘‘Noblest Act’’), 196
347
Farley, Katie (‘‘Noblest Act’’), 196 Farmer’s Return, The, 321 Farrar and Rinehart, 68 Fasolt (‘‘Miss King’’), 181 Father and Son, 72 Father Brown, 279 Father Figure, 193 Faun, The, 119 Fauves, 156, 238 Fear and Trembling, 306 Featherstone, Mark (‘‘Book-Bag’’), 10 Feaverham, Lord (Marriages Are Made in Heaven), 152 Federated Malay States, 1, 4, 13, 36, 48– 49, 50, 192, 196, 206 Felix (‘‘Giulia Lazzari’’), 70 Femm, Horace (Old Dark House), 278 Fenimore, Simon (Christmas Holiday), 23 Fennell, Thomas (Theatre), 277 Fenwick, Arthur (Our Betters), 204, 250 Fergusson, Ada (Penelope), 213 Fernandez (‘‘Man from Glasgow’’), 149 Fernando, Don (Don Fernando), 36 Ferrer, Jose, 90, 181, 228 Feuchtwanger, Leon, 111 Field, Herbert (Merry-Go-Round), 178, 179 Field, Marshall, 249 Field, Thomas, 117 Fielding, Henry, 74 Fifty Modern English Writers, 282 Figaro, 151 Finch, Lena (‘‘Three Fat Women of the Antibes’’), 279 Fiorello! 304 Firbank, Ronald, 93 Firecrackers, 294 First Mrs. Fraser, The, 43, 274 First National Pictures, 15 Fischer, Ernst Kuno, 66, 170, 247 Fitzgerald, Edward, 170 Fitzherbert, Augustus (‘‘Lord Mountdrago’’), 138 Fitzherbert, Mrs. (Bishop’s Apron), 9 Flaubert, Gustave, 55, 74, 174 Fleming, Ian, xvii, 49 Fleming, Marie Lewis, 49 Flint, Rowley (Up at the Villa), 85, 291
348
INDEX
‘‘Flirtation,’’ 49–50 Florentine Histories, 106, 147 ‘‘Flotsam and Jetsom,’’ 31, 50 Fonda, Henry, 194 Fontaine, Joan, 96 Fools and Their Folly, 278 ‘‘Footprints in the Jungle,’’ 1, 40, 50–51 ‘‘Footprints in the Jungle and Two Other Stories,’’ 87 For Services Rendered, xv, 51–52, 87, 143, 236 Forbes-Robertson, John, 63 ‘‘Force of Circumstances, The,’’ 18, 40, 52–53 Force of Nature, The, 53 Ford, Ford Madox, 98, 218, 290 Ford, James (Tenth Man), 276 Ford, Richard, 125 Foreman, Albert Edward (‘‘Verger’’), 295– 96 Forestier, Eleanor (‘‘Lion’s Skin’’), 134 Forestier, Robert (‘‘Lion’s Skin’’), 134 Forever and a Day, 154 Forrester, Albert (‘‘Creative Impulse’’), 31 Forrester, Mrs. Albert (‘‘Creative Impulse’’), 31 Forster, E. M., xv, 53–54, 62, 93, 104, 240, 315 Forsyte Saga, 61 Forsythe, William (Hero), 88 Fort Comme la Morte, 174 Fortnightly Review, The, 54, 149 Fortress, The, 300 ‘‘Fortunate Painter and the Honest Jew, The,’’ 54, 111 Foster, Ian (Hour Before the Dawn), 96 Foster, Jane (Hour Before the Dawn), 96 Fouldes, Paradine (Lady Frederick), 122 ‘‘Four Dutchmen, The,’’ 30, 55 Four Modern Story Tellers, 87 Four Winds of Love, The, 143 Fowler, Jane (‘‘Jane’’), 93, 110 France, 55–56 France, C. V., 51 France at War, xvi, 56–57, 59, 103 Franco-Prussian War, 119, 168, 174
Frankfurt, Treaty of, 168 Frece, Lauri de, 27 Frederick III, 193 Freeman, Thomas (Smith), 138, 257 Freeth, H. A., 222 French Guiana, 57 ‘‘French Joe,’’ 30, 57–58 French, Samuel, 8, 24, 228, 240 Frere, Alexander Stuart, 58–59, 279 Frere, Pat, 59 Freud, Sigmund, 229 Friedberg, Dora (Hour Before the Dawn), 96 ‘‘Friend in Need, A,’’ 30, 58 Frith, Catherine (Narrow Corner), 191 Frith, George P. (Narrow Corner), 101, 191 Frith, Louise (Narrow Corner), 191 Fritzi (‘‘Traitor’’), 282 Frobisher, Gilbert (‘‘Jane’’), 110 Frohman, Charles, 6, 11, 59–60, 115, 121, 136, 188, 212, 286 Frohman, Daniel, 59 Frohman, Gustav, 59 From the Four Winds, 61 Full Circle, 68 Fulton, Maude (Unattainable), 287 Future of Drinking, The, 249 Galbraith, Lady (Merry-Go-Round), 179 Gallagher (‘‘P. & O.’’), 206 Gallipoli Memories, 143 Galsworthy, John, 16, 61–62, 73, 86, 212, 290 Gandhi, Mohandas, 101 Gann, Margaret (Landed Gentry), 126 Gann, Mr. (Landed Gentry), 126 Garbo, Greta, 90, 207 Garden of Paradise, The, 251 Garnet, Henry (‘‘Facts of Life’’), 47 Garnet, Nicholas (‘‘Facts of Life’’), 47 Garnett, Constance, 62 Garnett, David, 62 Garnett, Edward, 62 Garnett, Richard, 62, 295 Garrick Club, xiii, xvii, 43, 63 Garrick, David, 63, 321 Garrick Theatre, 35
INDEX
Garstin, Bernard (Painted Veil), 207 Garstin, Doris (Painted Veil), 207 Garstin, Mrs. (Painted Veil), 207 Gatherings in Spain, 125 Gauguin, Eugene Henri Paul, 36, 63–64, 172, 182, 197, 198, 218, 273 Gaumont British, 248 Gauvain, Achille (Razor’s Edge), 232 Gavin, Pierre (‘‘Unconquered’’), 288 Gaze, Major (‘‘Footprints in the Jungle’’), 50 Geneva Convention, 233 Geneva, University of, 49 Gentleman in the Parlour, The, xv, 14, 64–65, 101, 103, 111, 158, 203, 223, 254 George (‘‘Mabel’’), 142 George III, 239 George IV, 240 George V, 311 George VI, 114, 194 George Allen and Unwin, 290 George Watson’s Ladies’ College, 307 Georgian Literary Scene, The, 271 Georgian Poetry, 153 Geray, Steve, 91 ‘‘German Harry,’’ 30, 57, 65–66 Germany, 66–67 Getting Married, 136 Ghosts, 99, 100 Ghosts of Berkeley Square, The, 279 Ghoul, The, 278 Giacomini, Piero (Then and Now), 278 Gielgud, John, 24, 252 Gifford, Emma, 81 ‘‘Gigolo and Gigolette,’’ 42, 67–68, 127, 182 Gilbert, William Schwenck, 63 Gin and Bitters, xv, 68 Ginger Ted (‘‘Vessel of Wrath’’), 296 Girl with Bare Feet, 217 Gissing, George, 27, 68–69 ‘‘Giulia Lazzari,’’ 3, 40, 70 Giuseppe (‘‘Wash-Tub’’), 301 Gleyre, Charles, 234, 255 Globe Theatre, 51, 136, 137, 139, 203, 228, 275, 294 God (‘‘Judgment Seat’’), 112
349
Goddard, Beatrice Romaine, 12 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 66, 220 Gogol, Nikolay, 265 Gold Rush, The, 21 Golden, John, 276 Goldsmith, Oliver, 79, 127, 208 Goldsmiths’ College of Art, 270 Goldwin, Samuel, 90 Golightly, Charles (Penelope), 213 Golightly, Isobel (Penelope), 213 Gomez (‘‘Traitor’’), 282 Goncourt, Edmond de, 55, 220 Goncourt, Jules de, 55, 220 Good Companions, The, 119 Good Housekeeping, 215 ‘‘Good Manners,’’ 70–71 Goodbye to Berlin, 104 Good-Bye, Wisconsin, 306 Goodnight Pelican, 152 Gordon, Charles George, 44, 268 Gordon Memorial College, 305 Gordon, Ruth, xvi, 56, 71–72, 113, 114 Gorky, Maxim, 265 Gosse, Edmund, 16, 72–73, 295 Gosse, Philip Henry, 72 Gosselyn, Julia Lambert (Theatre), 6, 100, 104, 127, 274, 277, 294 Gosselyn, Michael (Theatre), 100, 277 Gosselyn, Roger (Theatre), 277 Goossens, Eugene, 41 Gouvernour, Monsieur le (‘‘Mariage of Convenience’’), 151 Graban, Peter von (‘‘Irish Gentleman’’), 103 Grabau family, 66 Grable, Betty, 91, 280 Grabow, Gustav (‘‘Traitor’’), 281 Grace, xiv, 126, 171, 294 Grand Hotel, 119 ‘‘Grand Style, The,’’ 202 Grandmothers, The, 306 Grange, Norman (‘‘Flotsam and Jetsam’’), 50 Grange, Vesta (‘‘Flotsam and Jetsam’’), 50 Granville-Barker, Harley, 73–74, 77, 149, 265 Gray, David, 256
350
INDEX
Gray, Miss (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 79 Gray, Thomas, 72 Grayston, George (Our Betters), 203 Grayston, Pearl (Our Betters), 109, 203, 250 Grazia, Paolo (Mask and the Face), 155 Grazia, Savina (Mask and the Face), 155 Great Audience, The, 249 Great Dictator, The, 21 Great Modern Reading, 103 Great Novelists and Their Novels, xvii, 74, 93 Greco, El, 36, 74–76, 93 ‘‘Greek, The,’’ 3 Greek Memories, 143 Green Hat, The, 3 Green, Howard (Road Uphill), 235 Green, Joseph, 283 Greene, Graham, 36, 58, 76 Greene, Jasper (‘‘Woman of Fifty’’), 314 Greene, Laura (‘‘Woman of Fifty’’), 314 Greet, Philip Ben, 73 Grein, Jack, 76–77 Grenet-Dancourt, Ernest, 195 Greyhound Bookshop, 6 Griffith, Corinne, 15 Griffith, Daisy (‘‘Bad Example’’), 34 Griffith, Herbert (‘‘Bad Example’’), 34 Griffith, Mary Ann (‘‘Bad Example’’), 34 Griffiths, Harry (Of Human Bondage), 114, 200, 241 Griffiths, Owen (‘‘Lord Mountdrago’’), 138 Gringoire, 18 Grosely (‘‘Mirage’’), 180 Gruyter, Evart (‘‘Vessel of Wrath’’), 296 Guernica, 217 Guillermo, Don (Don Fernando), 36 Gunn, Thom, 260 ‘‘Gustav,’’ 3 Guy (‘‘Force of Circumstances’’), 52 Guy and Pauline, 143 Gwenn, Edmund, 126 Habart, Dollie (‘‘Lady Habart’’), 123 Habart, Lord (‘‘Lady Habart’’), 123 Haddo, Mr. and Mrs. (Magician), 146 Haddo, Oliver (Magician), 32, 144
Haggard, H. Rider, 302 Hague, Guy, 102 ‘‘Hairless Mexican, The,’’ 3, 40, 78–79, 114 Hairless Mexican and the Traitor, 87 Hallam, Basil, 136 Halliwell, John (Man of Honour), 150 Halstane, Gerald (Mrs. Dot), 188 Hamilton College, 316 Hamilton, Lady, 266 Hamlyn, Mrs. (‘‘P. & O.’’), 206 Hammond, Geoffrey (‘‘Letter’’), 130, 132 Handbook for Travellers in Spain, 125 Hannay, Governor (‘‘Door of Opportunity’’), 37 Hans (‘‘Unconquered’’), 288 ‘‘Happy Couple, The,’’ 31, 79–80, 178 ‘‘Happy Man, The,’’ 30, 80–81 Happy Prince and Other Tales, The, 309 Hard Woman, A, 98 Hardcastle, Kate (She Stoops to Conquer), 127 Hardwick, Cedrick Webster, 51 Hardy, Florence Dugdale, 68, 81 Hardy, Frederick (‘‘Lion’s Skin’’), 134 Hardy, Olive (‘‘Book-Bag’’), 10 Hardy, Sally (‘‘Book-Bag’’), 10 Hardy, Thomas, 16, 54, 68, 72–73, 81– 82, 263, 295, 302, 306 Hardy, Tim (‘‘Book-Bag’’), 10 Hare, Augustus John, 82–83, 263, 293 Hare, John, 303 Hare, Julius Charles, 82 Harenger, Richard (‘‘Treasure’’), 283 Harold (‘‘Before the Party’’), 8 Harper’s, 19 Harper’s Bazaar, 281 Harpignies, Henri, 184 Harrison, Robbie (Unknown), 289 Harrington, John Quincy (‘‘Mr. Harrington’s Washing’’), 115, 185 Harrow School, 61, 82, 117, 318 Hart, Moss, 316 Harte, Bret, 302 Hartford, Huntington, 281 Harvard University, 8, 26, 41, 66, 72, 119, 222, 248, 250 Harvest Comedy, 271
INDEX
Harvester, Dr. (Sacred Flame), 242 Harvey, Fleming (Our Betters), 203 Harvey, Laurence, 90, 198 Hassan (‘‘Yellow Streak’’), 318 Hatter’s Castle, 119 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 66, 99, 265 Haverley’s Minstrels, 59 Havoc, June, 228 Hawaii, 83 Hawkins, Jack, 12 Hawthornden Prize, 303 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 220 Hawtree, Charles Henry, 83–84, 107, 108, 195 Haxton, George, 84 Haxton, Gerald, vii, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 11, 14, 32, 35, 48, 56, 57, 64, 83, 84– 85, 92, 95, 101, 102, 129, 130, 153, 154, 158, 167, 172, 173, 180, 215, 216, 222, 227, 229, 234, 236, 244, 245, 247, 254, 267, 268, 269, 273, 285, 291, 295, 307, 308, 313, 318 Haxton, Sarah, 84 Hay Fever, 274 Haymarket Theatre, 24, 127, 136, 283, 294, 299 Hayward, G. Etheredge (Of Human Bondage), 13, 199 Hayworth, Rita, 90, 181, 228 Hazlitt, William, 64–65, 109, 293 Heard, Henry Fitzgerald, 85–86, 104, 105 Hearst’s International, 206 Heart of the Matter, The, 76 Heart Song, 278 Heartbreak House, 250 Hedda Gabler, 99 Hegel, G.W.F., 246 Heidelberg, Germany, xii, xviii, 12, 66, 100, 138, 169, 170, 199, 211, 247 Heidelberg, University of, 66, 211 Heinemann, William, xiii, xvii, 13, 15, 19, 27, 40, 43, 45, 51, 56, 58, 64, 74, 86–87, 91, 107, 121, 123, 125, 126, 136, 137, 143, 144, 145, 177, 180, 182, 187, 188, 190, 198, 203, 207, 211, 213, 220, 230, 242, 252, 256, 268, 269, 275, 276, 278, 284, 287, 289, 291, 293, 303, 316
351
Hell of an Actor, A, 113 Helmer, Nora (Doll’s House), 12, 100 Hemingway, Ernest, 181 Hemingway, Marie, 136 Henderson, George (Hour Before the Dawn), 96 Henderson, Jim (Hour Before the Dawn), 96 Henderson, May (Hour Before the Dawn), 96 Henderson, Roger (Hour Before the Dawn), 96 Henderson, Tommy (Hour Before the Dawn), 96 Henreid, Paul, 90, 198 Henry V, 137, 279 Henry VIII, 117 Henry Miller’s Theatre, 241 Hepburn, Katharine, 209 Herbartus (‘‘His Excellency’’), 89 Here and There, 42, 67, 87, 243, 245 Here Lies, 210 Hero, The, xiii, 10, 87–88, 169, 171, 289, 290 Herries Chronicle, 300 Hertford College, Oxford, 303 Heywood, Canon (‘‘Before the Party’’), 8 Hichens, Robert, 310 Hicks, Seymour, 119 Hickson, Frances (‘‘Three Fat Women of the Antibes’’), 279 Higgins, Baroness von (‘‘Giulia Lazzari’’), 70 High Road, The, 251 High Wall, 154 ‘‘His Excellency,’’ 3, 40, 88–90, 114 His Majesty’s Theatre, 35, 40, 214, 283, 284, 294 History of Mr. Polly, The, 306 History of the English Speaking Peoples, 24, 153 Hobhouse, George (‘‘Louise’’), 139 Hodder and Stoughton, 187 Hodgson, Rev., 117 Hodgson’s, 261 Hogan, Captain (‘‘Bad Example’’), 34 Hogarth Press, 315 Hogg, James, 239
352
INDEX
Holding, Thomas, 136 Holdsworth, Geoffrey, 266 Holland, Ambrose (Jack Straw), 107 Hollywood, California, xv, xvi, 21, 35, 90–91, 104, 120, 130, 158, 173, 216, 218, 228, 295 Holme, Bryan, 168 Holt, Helen Maude, 283 Holt, Wyman (‘‘Woman of Fifty’’), 315 Holtzminden, Count (‘‘Miss King’’), 181 ‘‘Home,’’ 30, 91 Home and Beauty, xv, 29, 91, 91–92, 247, 280 Homosexuality, 75, 92–94, 302 Hong Kong, 94 Hong Kong, Bishop of (‘‘Before the Party’’), 8 Hong Kong, University of, 132 ‘‘Honolulu,’’ 40, 83, 94, 284 Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 244 Hope, John, xvii, 95, 158, 176 Hope, Jonathan Charles, xvii, 95 Hope, Julian John Somerset, xvii, 95, 158 Hope, Victor Alexander, 95 Hopper, Hedda, 194 Horizon, xvi, 28 ‘‘Horla, Le,’’ 174 Hornby, Reginald (Land of Promise), 124 Horse Feathers, 214 Horta de Hebro, 217 Hour Before the Dawn, The, xvi, 71, 91, 95–97, 173 House and Garden, 162 House, Edward, 313 House of Lords, 72, 166 House of Lords Records Office, 26 House of Mirth, The, 308 House Un-American Activities Committee, 210 Housman, A. E., 295 Housman, Laurence, xiii, 30, 152, 295, 310 How To Write a Play, 43 Howard, Leslie, 35, 90, 198 Howard, Sidney, 251 Howard’s End, 53 Howell-Thomas, Dorothy, 275
Hubbard, Miss (‘‘Round Dozen’’), 238 Hudson, Florie (Narrow Corner), 190 Hudson, Patrick (Narrow Corner), 190 Hudson Theatre, 203 Hudson, W. H., 62 Huerta, Victoriano, 78 Hughes, Edward (Ted), 260 ‘‘Human Element, The,’’ 40, 97, 256 Human Factor, The, 76 Humanities, 143 Humbert, Marcelle, 217 Hun School, 320 Hunt, Alfred William, 98 Hunt, Margaret Raine, 98 Hunt, Violet, xiii, 97–98, 125, 234, 295, 300, 307 Hunter, Bateman (‘‘Fall of Edward Barnard’’), 48 Huntington, Helen, 73 Hurle, Leverson (Gin and Bitters), 68 Hurrell, Frank (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 79, 80 Hurrell, Frank (Magician), 145 Hurrell, Frank (Merry-Go-Round), 178 Husband of Poverty, The, 164 Huston, Walter, 90, 228 Hutchinson and Company, 87 Huxley, Aldous Leonard, 86, 104, 129, 201, 212 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 54, 305 Huyshe, Wentworth, 165 Huysmans, Joris Karl, 55 Hydari, Akbar, 102 Hyeres, France, xii, 55, 66, 116, 170, 174 I Can Get It for You Wholesale, 304 I Was a Spy, 154 Ibn Saud, 194 Ibsen, Henrik, 12, 66, 72, 76, 99–100, 152, 153, 170, 307 I’ll Never Go There Any More, 304 Illustrated London News, 262 Images of Truth, 306 Imperial Indian Police, 299 Imperial Theatre, 73, 127, 149, 265 Importance of Being Earnest, The, 294, 309 ‘‘In a Strange Land,’’ 30, 100 In My Solitary Life, 82
INDEX
In Old Chicago, 285 In Old New York, 308 Incorporated Law Society, 167, 168 Independent Review, 53 Independent Novels Series, 290 Independent Theatre of London, 76 India, 100–102 Indian National Congress, 101 Indiana, University of, 26 Indochina, 102–3 Inexperience, 119 Infatuation, 15 Infirm Glory, The, 311 Ingres, Jean, 235 ‘‘Inside Story of the Collapse of France,’’ 103 Insoley, Archibald (Landed Gentry), 126 Insoley, Claude (Landed Gentry), 126 Insoley, Grace (Landed Gentry), 126 Insoley, Mrs. (Landed Gentry), 126 Interieur au Parquet Grave, 156 Introduction to Modern English and American Literature, 103, 129 ‘‘Irish Gentleman, An,’’ 103–4 Irish Sweepstakes, 252 Irving, Ethel, 104, 121 Irving, Henry, 63, 283, 304, 321 Irwin, Sarah, 177 Isherwood, Christopher, 53, 86, 96, 104– 5, 291 Isis, 192–93 Island in the Sun, 302 Isle of Fury, 91, 105 ‘‘It Pays To Be Ignorant,’’ 295 Italy, 105–6 Ives, Charlotte, 279 Ivor, Frances, 136 Izart (‘‘Yellow Streak’’), 318 Jack Straw, xiv, 12, 84, 87, 90, 107–8, 120, 171 Jackson, Arnold (‘‘Fall of Edward Barnard’’), 48 Jackson, Eva (‘‘Fall of Edward Barnard’’), 48 Jacob’s Room, 315 James, Henry, 54, 72, 86, 98, 103, 108– 9, 218, 220, 260, 293, 308
353
James Tate Black Memorial Prize, 300, 303 James, William, 108 ‘‘Jane,’’ 8, 30, 40, 93, 109–10, 256, 262 Jane Avril Leaving the Moulin Rouge, 280 Janes, Jose, 262 Jasper, Brother (‘‘Faith’’), 47 Japanese Maugham Society, 110 Jennie Gerhart, 38 Jennings, Elizabeth Joan, 260 Jeremy, 300 Jerome, Helen, 276 Jervis, Dr. (Sheppey), 253 Jester, The, 221 Jeune, Christian, 263 Jeune, Francis, 263 Jews, 110–11 Jezebel, 35 Jocelyn, 61 John (‘‘Honolulu’’), 94 John (‘‘Judgment Seat), 112 John-Adolphus (‘‘Irish Gentleman’’), 103 John Cornelius, 301 Johns, Glynis, 42 Johnson, Mrs. E. F., 203 Johnson, Samuel, vii, 113 Johnson, Tiare (Moon and Sixpence), 183, 273 Jonas, Klaus W., xvii, 19, 271 Jones, Ethelwyn Sylvia (Sue), xiii, xiv, xvii, 16, 111–12, 115, 137, 161, 213, 266, 283 Jones, Henry Arthur, 111 Jones, Martha (‘‘Vessel of Wrath’’), 296 Jones, Owen (‘‘Vessel of Wrath’’), 296 Jones, Richard, 223 Jordan, Teddie (Christmas Holiday), 23 Jose (‘‘Man from Glasgow’’), 149 Jourdain, Lucille (Perfect Gentleman), 215 Jourdain, Madame (Perfect Gentleman), 215 Jourdain, Monsieur (Perfect Gentleman), 214 Joyce, Howard (Letter), 132 Joyce, James, 103, 239, 295 Joyce, Mr. (‘‘Letter’’), 130
354
INDEX
Jude the Obscure, 81 Judge, The, 307 Judge Magazine, 214 ‘‘Judgment Seat, The,’’ 30, 112 Judith Paris, 300 Juin, Alphonse-Pierre, 184 Julius Caesar, 148 Jungle Books, 117 Jury Studios, 256 Just So Stories, 117 Kahn, Florence, 8 Kaiser, Georg, 265 Kangaroo, 129 Kanin, Garson, 56, 71, 113–14 Kant, Immanuel, xvii, 7, 10, 293 Karno, Fred, 21 Kasha-Upanishad, 230 Kastellan, Lady (‘‘Casual Affair’’), 18 Kaufman, George S., 316 Keane, Doris, 252 Kear, Alroy (Cakes and Ale), xv, 16, 59, 70, 81, 109, 301 Kelada, Max (‘‘Mr. Know-All’’), 186 Kelly, Gerald, xiii, 4, 9, 32, 55, 89, 112, 114–15, 120, 137, 149, 171, 184, 197, 221, 239, 261, 320 Kelly, Grace, xviii Kemp, Liza (Liza of Lambeth), 135 Kemp, Mrs. (Liza of Lambeth), 135 Kendal, William, 303–4 Kendall, Messmore, 131 Kensington Art School, 98 Kent, Basil (Man of Honour), 73, 149, 162, 265, 304 Kent, Basil (Merry-Go-Round), 178 Kent, Lord, 49 Kerensky, Alexander, 115, 120, 172, 186, 313 Kersal, Bernard (Constant Wife), 28 Keun, Odette, 306 Keynes, John Maynard, 267, 315 Keys to Heaven, 115 Kid, The, 21 Kidnapped, 267 ‘‘Killers, The,’’ 181 Kim, 117
King, Dennis, 114 King, Miss (‘‘Miss King’’), 181 King’s College, Cambridge, 53 King’s College, London, 152 King’s School, xii, xvi, xvii, xviii, 3, 26, 66, 115–17, 135, 167, 169, 170, 209, 221, 253–54, 300 Kingsblood Royal, 133 Kipling, Alice, 117 Kipling, John Lockwood, 117 Kipling, Rudyard, 16, 44, 54, 86, 101, 117–18, 179, 302 Kipps, 306 Kismet, 119 Kiss the Boys Goodbye, 140 Kitchener, Herbert Horatio, 44 ‘‘Kite, The,’’ 2, 27, 31, 118–19, 226 Kite and Other Stories, The, 87 Knoblock, Edward, 90, 119–20 Knopf, Alfred, 125 Kong (‘‘Flotsam and Jestam’’), 50 Kornilov, Lavr, 115 Kosti (Razor’s Edge), 232 Krause, Hans (‘‘Winter Cruise’’), 312 Kropotkin, Alexandra, 115, 120 Kropotkin, Pyotr Alexeyvich, 120 Kruschwitz, Hans, 111 Kuhn and Loeb, 313 Kuhn, Rudolf (‘‘Fortunate Painter’’), 54 La Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 214 La Falterona (‘‘Voice of the Turtle’’), 127, 297 La Famille du Pecheur, 259 La Fayette, Marie Madeleine de, 15 La Fete d’une Mere, 259 La Fontaine, Jean de, 2 La Gorda (‘‘Closed Shop’’), 26 La Maschera e il Volto, 21, 22, 155 La Princesse de Cleves, 15 La Societie et le High Life, 157 Labouchere, Henry Du Pre, 32 Ladies of the Corridor, 210 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 128 Lady Frederick, xiv, 6, 12, 41, 59, 73, 87, 90, 104, 105, 110, 121–22, 171, 266, 286 ‘‘Lady Habart,’’ 110, 121, 122–23
INDEX
Lady Windermere’s Fan, 309 Lady with a Parasol, The, 156 Lal, Chandra (‘‘Giulia Lazzari’’), 70 Lamb, Charles, 50, 65, 109 Lambert, Miss (‘‘Consul’’), 29 ‘‘Lambeth Idyll, A,’’ 62, 134, 290 Laments for the Living, 210 Lanchester, Elsa, 7, 91, 296 Lancing School, 303 Land of Promise, The, xiv, 11, 17, 90, 123–25, 171, 294 Land of the Blessed Virgin, The, xiii, 80, 98, 125–26, 171, 237–38, 261–62, 315 Landau, J. S., 176 Landed Gentry, xiv, 126–27 Landon, Edward (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 79 Langford, Abraham, 260–61 Langton, Algernon (Merry-Go-Round), 179 Langton, Bella (Merry-Go-Round), 179 Langton, James (Theatre), 277 Langtry, Edward, 127 Langtry, Emilie, 127 Larcher, Mr. (Hero), 88 Larcher, Mrs. (Hero), 88 Larcher, Reginald (Hero), 87 Larcom, Dorothy (‘‘P. & O.’’), 206 Larion, Lisette (‘‘Appearance and Reality’’), 3 Larregle, Jean, 128 Lasky, Jesse, 90 Last Laugh, The, 214 Latimer, Ruth (Road Uphill), 235 Latymer, Hugo (Song of Twilight), 31 Laughter in Paradise, 279 Laughton, Charles, 7, 91, 296 Laura (‘‘String of Beads’’), 269 Laurencin, Marie, 36, 128, 222, 225 Lawrence, D. H., xv, 62, 128–29, 180, 239, 285, 286 Lawrence, Frieda, 128, 180 Lawrence, Norman, 228 Lawson, Andrew (‘‘Pool’’), 221 Lawson, Bertie (‘‘Pool’’), 221, 245 Lawson, Frederick (Of Human Bondage), 114 Lawson, Lionel, 285 Lazzari, Giulia (‘‘Guilia Lazzari’’), 70
355
Lazzolo, Vasco, 222 League of British Dramatists, 43 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 283 Le Breton, W. C., 127 Le Bretonne, Mimi (Lady Frederick), 122 Le Carre, John, 260 Le Chat Blanc, 114, 144 Le Raboteur, 280–81 Le Sueur, Raymond, (‘‘Appearance and Reality’’), 2 Le Touquet, Normandy, xv, 158 Leautaud, Paul, 220 Lee Tai Cheng (East of Suez), 41 Lefevre, Enid (Camel’s Back), 17 Lefevre, Hermione (Camel’s Back), 17 Lefevre, Valentine (Camel’s Back), 17 Left Hand: Right Hand, 256 Legal Observer, 168 Legrand, Louis, 129–30, 222 Legros, Bessie (Sheppey), 253 Leigh, Augusta, 10 Leigh, George, 261 Leighton, Frederic, 63 Leir, Monsieur (‘‘Fortunate Painter’’), 54, 110 Lemmon, Jack, 114 Lemon, Mark, 163 Lennox, Dr. (‘‘Sanatorium’’), 245 Leon, Jose (‘‘Romantic Young Lady’’), 237 Leonards (Up at the Villa), 291 Leoni, Giacomo, 26 Leonidov, Anastasia (‘‘Mr. Harrington’s Washing’’), 120, 186 Leonidov, Vladimir (‘‘Mr. Harrington’s Washing’’), 186 Leopold II, 175 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 217 Les Gaites du Veuvage, 195 Les Jeunes, 143 Lesser Questions, 263 Lessing, Doris, 260 Letter, The, xv, 18, 30, 35, 40, 90, 131– 32, 154 ‘‘Letter, The,’’ 18, 40, 130–31, 240 Leveaux, Montague Vivian, 111 Leverson, Ada, 68, 132–33, 310 Leverson, Ernest, 132
356
INDEX
Levitski, Aaron (Lady Frederick), 110, 122 Levy, Joseph, 285 Lewes, George Henry, 54 Lewis Investment Trust, 250 Lewis, Sinclair, xv, 58, 68, 133–34, 256 Lewis, Wyndham, 98, 143 Ley, Mary [Polly] (Merry-Go-Round), 178, 179 Ley, Mary [Polly] (Mrs. Craddock, 187 Ley, Miss (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 79 Library of Congress, xvii, 173, 198 Life, 77 Life and Letters, 142, 259, 267, 293 Life with Father, 281 Like a Lover, 306 Limit, The, 68, 133 Linacre, Thomas, 115 Lincoln’s Inn, 166 Lindbergh, Charles, 194 Lindo, Olga, 228 Lindsell, John, xiv, 32, 85 Linsell, Mrs. (‘‘P. & O.’’), 206 Lions and Shadows, 104 ‘‘Lion’s Skin, The,’’ 134, 182 Literary Fund Society, 239 Literary Guild, 38 Little, Arthur (Caesar’s Wife), 15 Little Foxes, The, 154 ‘‘Little Mermaid, The,’’ 251 Little, Violet (Caesar’s Wife), 15 Littlewood, Archie (Unknown), 289 Littlewood, Charlotte (Unknown), 289, 316 Littlewood, Ned (Unknown), 289 Liverpool Post, 236 Liverpool Repertory Theatre, 35 Liverpool University, 267 Livingstone, David, 44 Livingstone, Sophie (‘‘String of Beads’’), 269 Liza of Lambeth, xiii, 26, 61, 68, 69, 72, 82, 116, 118, 134–36, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164, 171, 174, 211, 254, 265, 290 Lloyd, Constance, 309 Lloyds of London, 5 Loafing in Long Island, 281
Loaves and Fishes, xv, 9, 12, 33, 87, 136, 138, 171, 303 Lohr, Marie, 12, 136–37, 138, 139, 256, 294 Lomas, Richard (Explorer), 44–45, 50 Lomas y Oria, Ferdinand (Noble Spaniard), 195 Lombardos (‘‘Hairless Mexican’’), 78 London County Council, 263 London and South of England Demobilization and Resettlement Department, 211 ‘‘London Day by Day,’’ 285 London Library, 291 London Hospital, 5 London Missionary Society, 243 London Pavillion, Ltd., 211 London, University of, 8, 42, 264 Long, Major (‘‘Pro Patria’’), 223 Long, Ray, 10 Longest Journey, The, 53 Longstaffe, Isabel (‘‘Fall of Edward Barnard’’), 48 ‘‘Looking Back on Eighty Years,’’ xviii, 7, 31, 59, 137, 159, 163, 193 Loom of Youth, The, 302 Loraine, Robert, 136, 137–38, 256 ‘‘Lord Mountdrago,’’ 138, 182 ‘‘Lotus Eater, The,’’ 17, 138–39 ‘‘Louise,’’ 30, 139 Louvre, 234 ‘‘Love,’’ 242 ‘‘Love and Russian Literature,’’ 3 Love in a Cottage, xiv, 136, 139–40 Love Lady, 119 Love’s Shadow, 133 Low, Arthur (‘‘Casual Affair’’), 18 Lowndes, Frederick (Home and Beauty), 92 Loyola, St. Ignatius, 36 Lucas, Edward, 223 Luce, Clare Boothe, 140–41 Luce, Henry Robinson, 140 ‘‘Lucia,’’ 9 Lulu Belle, 251 ‘‘Luncheon, The,’’ 30, 141 Lusiad, The, 191 Lusitania, 59, 226
INDEX
Luton, Edward (Circle), 25 Lyceum Theatre, 123, 283, 304 Lyngate, Mary (‘‘String of Beads’’), 269 Lyric Theatre, 45, 299 Lysistrata, 249 ‘‘Mabel,’’ 142 MacAdam, Neil (‘‘Neil MacAdam’’), 192 MacArdle, Andrew (‘‘Buried Talent’’), 13 MacArdle, Blanche (‘‘Buried Talent’’), 13 MacArthur, Charles, 251 MacAvoy, Edouard, 222, 225 MacCarthy, Desmond, 36, 142–43, 259 MacDonald, Bob (Razor’s Edge), 231 MacDonald, Mr. and Mrs. (‘‘Social Sense’’), 259 MacDonald, Ramsay, 16 MacDonald, Sophie (Razor’s Edge), 93, 231–32 Machiavelli, Marietta (Then and Now), 278 Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 106, 147, 148, 278 Mackenzie, Alexander (Explorer), 22, 43– 46, 118, 299 MacKenzie, Edward Compton, 27, 37, 119, 143–44 ‘‘Mackintosh,’’ 40, 144, 244, 284 MacMurray, Fred, 91, 280 MacPhail, Alec (‘‘Rain’’), 229 MacPhail, Mrs. (‘‘Rain’’), 229 Macready, William Charles, 63 Madame Bovary, 74 Madden, Broderick (Road Uphill), 235 Mademoiselle Zampa, xiii, 144, 234 Madras House, The, 73 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 90 Magdalen College, Oxford, 117, 143, 309, 311 Magician, The, 32, 55, 56, 87, 106, 114, 144–46, 171, 178, 179, 184, 197 Maharshi, Bhagavan Ramana, 102 Mahon, Mrs. (‘‘Pro Patria’’), 223 Maiden’s Progress, The, 98 Main Street, 133 Mainland, 249 Maison Tellier, Le, 174
357
Maitland, Iris (‘‘Louise’’), 139 Maitland, Louise (‘‘Louise’’), 139 Maitland, Tom (‘‘Louise’’), 139 Major Barbara, 136, 250 Make Me an Offer, 279 ‘‘Making of a Millionaire,’’ 146–47 Making of a Saint, The, xiii, 17, 62, 106, 147–48, 171, 290 Malherbe, Francoise de, 72 Malthus, Thomas, 240 Malvoleon, Bluey, xviii, 148, 158, 208 Mamoulian, Rouben, 229 Man and Superman, 136, 250 ‘‘Man and Wife,’’ 59 ‘‘Man from Glasgow, A,’’ 31, 148–49 Man in the White Suit, The, 279 Man of Devon, 61 Man of Honour, A, xiii, 7, 8, 10, 54, 59, 73, 77, 144, 149–50, 171, 234, 261, 265, 304, 317 Man Who Came to Dinner, The, 316 Man Who Could Work Miracles, The, 279 ‘‘Man with a Conscience, A,’’ 57, 150– 51, 182 ‘‘Man with a Scar, The,’’ 30, 151 Man with Two Mirrors, The, 119 Man Within, The, 76 Mander, Raymond, 284 Manet, Edouard, 218 Mann, Thomas, 19, 194, 247 Manning, Edward, 267–68 Manoeuvres of Jane, The, 111 Manua, 244 Mansfield, Katherine, 220 Manson, Fred (‘‘Episode’’), 42 Manson, Gerrard (‘‘Social Sense’’), 259 Manson, Mrs. (‘‘Social Sense’’), 259 Mantona, Pablo (‘‘Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian’’), 224 Mantona, Sebastian de (‘‘Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian’’), 224 Manuma (‘‘Mackintosh’’), 144 Marbella, Countess de (‘‘Romantic Young Lady’’), 237 Marbury and Bright, 12 Marie-Odile, 119 Marivaux, Pierre, 108
358
INDEX
Mark Tapper Forum, 113 Marlborough College, 192, 246 Marlowe, Christopher, 115 Marmount, Percy, 15 Marquet, Pierre-Albert, 184 Marquis, The, 311 ‘‘Marriage of Convenience, A,’’ 151–52 Marriage of Kitty, The, 274 Marriage Unlimited, 152 ‘‘Marriages Are Made in Heaven,’’ xiii, 100, 152, 295 Marr-Johnson, Diana, 152–53, 159, 163, 165, 166 Marr-Johnson, Frederick, 152 Marr-Johnson, Kenneth, 152, 153 Marr-Johnson, Simon, 152 Marr-Johnson, William, 152 Marrying of Ann Leete, The, 73 Marsh, Edward, 73, 125, 153, 256 Marsh, Edward (Land of Promise), 124 Marsh, Gertrude (Land of Promise), 124 Marsh, Norah (Land of Promise), 123, 294 Marshall, Herbert, 35, 90, 91, 132, 154, 182, 207, 230 Martelli, Aurelia (Then and Now), 278 Martelli, Bartolomeo (Then and Now), 278 Martha’s Vineyard, xvi, 30, 154 Marti-Ibanez, Felix, 154–55 Martinez, Diego (Catalina), 19 Maruzen Bookstore, 110 Marx, (Arthur) Harpo, 71, 316 Mary (‘‘Judgment Seat’’), 112 Mary Baxter (‘‘Taipan’’), 274 Mary, Princess (‘‘Irish Gentleman’’), 103 Mary, Queen, 130, 226 Maryland, University of, 215 Masefield, John, 54, 179, 240, 295 Mask and the Face, The, xv, 22, 155 Masochism, 241 Mason, Charley (Christmas Holiday), 23 Mason, Ralph (‘‘Point of Law’’), 220 Masood, Syed Ross, 53 Master Builder, The, 99 Master of Ballantrae, The, 267 ‘‘Masterson,’’ 155–56 Matisse, Henri Emile, 156, 184, 238, 308
Matriarch, The, 266 Matthew, General, 159 Matthews, Charles James, 63 Mattingly, Cyprian Peter, 177 Maturin, Gray (Razor’s Edge), 38, 231 Maturin, Isabel Bradley (Razor’s Edge), 230–31 Mauga, 243 Maugham, 270 Maugham (Razor’s Edge), 230–33 Maugham, Charles Ormond, xii, 55, 114, 157, 159, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170 Maugham, Edith Mary Snell, xi, xii, 55, 127, 137, 157, 159, 164, 167, 168, 170, 174, 258, 259 Maugham, Edward Alan, xii, 157 Maugham, Elizabeth Mary (Liza), xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 95, 105, 137, 148, 157– 59, 161, 162, 163, 172, 176, 208, 209, 235, 238, 248, 255, 256, 271, 292, 311 Maugham, Ellen Mary Matthew, xi, xii, 159, 163, 164 Maugham, Frederic Herbert, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 13, 152, 157, 159–60, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 208, 313, 314 Maugham, Gwendolyn Syrie Barnardo Wellcome, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, 5, 26, 31, 37, 59, 68, 95, 105, 137, 157, 159, 160–63, 172, 176, 193, 208, 209, 234, 250, 252, 256, 262, 300, 304, 305, 307, 311 Maugham, Helen Mary Romer, xii, xiii, xiv, xvii, 13, 152, 159, 163, 165, 166 Maugham, Henry MacDonald, xi, xii, xiii, 116, 159, 163–64, 167, 168, 169, 170, 309 Maugham, Henry (Harry) Neville, xii, xiii, 55, 157, 159, 163, 164, 164–65, 167, 168, 169, 216 Maugham, Honor Betty Earl, xiii, xv, 152, 159, 163, 165, 166 Maugham, Joseph Beaumont the elder, 165, 166 Maugham, Jospeh Beaumont the younger, 165, 166 Maugham Prize, xvii Maugham, Ralph S., 165, 166
INDEX
Maugham Reader, The, 222 Maugham, Robert Cecil Romer (Robin), xiv, xvi, xviii, 152, 159, 163, 165, 166– 67, 169, 314 Maugham, Robert Cleveland, xii, 167, 168 Maugham, Robert Ormond the elder, xi, 163, 167–68, 168 Maugham, Robert Ormond the younger, xi, xii, 55, 63, 157, 159, 163, 164, 167, 168–69, 169–70, 309 Maugham, (Barbara) Sophia (Sophie) Von Scheidlin, xii, 66, 159, 163, 169, 170, 309 Maugham Twelve, A, 87 Maugham, William Somerset, 169–74; portraits of, 221–22 Maugham’s Malaysian Stories, 87 Maupassant, Guy de, 136, 143, 170, 174– 75, 220 Mauresque, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 37, 41, 49, 56, 59, 64, 71, 95, 105, 128, 130, 141, 153, 160, 167, 169, 173, 175–76, 184, 216, 236, 245, 247, 248, 255, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 285, 295, 302, 306, 308, 311, 312, 316, 320 Maurice, 53 Maurice, Edmund, 275 Maxine Elliott Theatre, 28, 228 ‘‘Mayhew,’’ 30, 176–77 Mayo, William, 304 Mayor of Casterbridge, The, 81 McCallum, John, 313 McClintic, Guthrie, 29, 131 McClure’s Magazine, 281 McDermott, Eddie (‘‘Straight Flush’’), 268 McDermott, Jamie (‘‘Straight Flush’’), 268 McDonnell, Angus, 112 McLeod, Mr. (‘‘Sanatorium’’), 245 Meade, Richard, 243 Meadows (‘‘Noblest Act’’), 196 Meadows, Charlie (‘‘Letter’’), 131 Meadows, Emily (‘‘Home’’), 91 Meadows, George (‘‘Home’’), 91 Meadows, Mrs. George (‘‘Home’’), 91
359
Meadows, Tom (‘‘Home’’), 91 Meadows, Uncle George (‘‘Home’’), 91 Meaning of Treason, The, 307 Medici, Lorenzo di, 147 Meditations, 190 Meeting by the River, 104 Meighan, Thomas, 17, 90 Melchoir, Lauritz, 300 Mellon, Mrs. Paul, 95 Meloney, Marie, 177, 279 Meloney, William Brown, 177 Melrose, Peter (‘‘Voice of the Turtle’’), 297, 312 Melville, Herman, 74, 93 Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, 246 Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 246 Memoirs of Fifty Years, 263 Memorial, The, 104 Men at Arms, 303 Mencken, H. L., 228 Meredith, George, 170 Mereston (Sheppey), 253 Mereston, Charles (Lady Frederick), 122 Mereston, George (Lady Frederick), 122 Mereston, Lady (Sheppey), 253 Mereston, Lord (Sheppey), 253 Mereston, Maude (Lady Frederick), 122 Merimee, Prosper, 157 Mermaid Series, 290 Merman, Ethel, 229 Merry-Go-Round, The, xiii, 27, 87, 171, 177–79 Merton College, Oxford, 7, 285 Metacom, 198 Methuen, Algernon, 179 Methuen and Company, 145, 179–80 Metro Company, 90 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 24, 198, 207, 250, 269 Metro Studios, 121 Meurice, Marie Louise (‘‘Man with a Conscience’’), 150 Meyerheim (Razor’s Edge), 232 Mexico, 180 Michael, F. Howard, 104 Michael, Ralph, 27 Middle East Intelligence Center, 166 Middle Temple, 211
360
INDEX
Middleton, Constance (Constant Wife), 28, 100 Middleton, John (Constant Wife), 28 Middleton, Constance (Constant Wife), 6, 28, 30 Middleton, John (Constant Wife), 28 Midhurst Grammar School, 305 Midland Bank, 95 Milbaud, Darius (‘‘Door of Opportunity’’), 36 Milestone, Lewis, 228 Milestones, 119 Miliotti, Mario (Mask and the Face), 155 Millais, John Everett, 63 Miller, Ada (Sheppey), 252 Miller, Emil (Of Human Bondage), 200 Miller, Florence (Sheppey), 252 Miller, Joseph (Sheppey), 252–53 Millicent (‘‘Before the Party’’), 8 Million Pound Note, The, 262 Milne, A. A., 274 Milvain, Jasper (New Grub Street), 70 Ministry of Munitions, 211 ‘‘Mirage,’’ 180–81, 203 ‘‘Miss King,’’ 3, 40, 181 Miss Mason’s School, 140 Miss Sadie Thompson, 90, 181, 228 ‘‘Miss Thompson,’’ 172, 228, 244 Mitchell, Carrie (Workers in the Dawn), 69 Mitchenson, Joe, 284 Mixture As Before, The, xvi, 47, 67, 134, 138, 150, 181–82, 202, 279, 283, 297 Moby Dick, 74 Modern Library Editions, 301 Modern Marriage Market, The, 263 Moliere, 108, 214, 283 Monet, Claude, 218, 255 Monkey Business, 214 Monsignor Quixote, 76 Montefiore Family, 217 Montgomerie, Captain (Lady Frederick), 110, 122 Month of Saturdays, A, 210 Montmorency, Esmerelda (Home and Beauty), 92 Moon and Sixpence, The, xiv, xvi, 12,
26, 56, 64, 69, 87, 91, 154, 172, 182– 84, 198, 261, 273, 320 Moonlight Sonata, 274 Moore, George, 33, 73, 133, 267 Moore, Mary, 284 Moratini, Allesandro (Making of a Saint), 148 Moratini, Bartolomeo (Making of a Saint), 148 Moratini, Scipione (Making of a Saint), 148 More Tales of the Uneasy, 98 Moreau, Gustav, 156, 238 Moreau Museum, 238 Moret, Count de (Noble Spaniard), 196 Moret, Kate (Noble Spaniard), 196 Morgan, Ted, 92, 153, 222 Morning Post (London), 43 Morocco, 184 Morosco Theatre, 131 Morrice, James Wilson, xiii, 145, 184–85 Morris, Gouverneur, 90 Morris, William 98 Morrison, Arthur, 62 Morrison, Robert (‘‘Man from Glasgow’’), 148 Mortimer, Raymond, 36 Morton, Gerald (‘‘Virtue’’), 297 Mosaic, 266 Moss Empires, Ltd., 211 ‘‘Mother, The,’’ 31, 185 Moulin de la Galette, 234 Movies and the Talkies, The, 249 Movies Come from America, The, 249 Moviola, 113 ‘‘Mr. Harrington’s Washing,’’ 3, 40, 115, 120, 185–86 ‘‘Mr. Know-All,’’ 30, 186–87, 245, 295 Mr. Norris Changes Trains, 104 Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill, 300 Mr. Pim Passes By, 274 ‘‘Mrs. Beamish,’’ 187 Mrs. Craddock, xiii, 56, 82, 86–87, 93, 106, 171, 178, 187–88, 265, 309 Mrs. Dalloway, 315 Mrs. Dot, xiv, 11, 12, 59, 65, 171, 188– 89, 274 Mrs. L. in White, 1907, 112
INDEX
Mulberry Bush, The, 119 Mulock, Edward (‘‘Taipan’’), 274 Mulqueen, Mr. and Mrs. J. J., 244 Mumsie, 154 Mundella Grammar School, 236 Munich, University of, 49 Munnings, Alfred, 114 Munro, Angus (‘‘Neil MacAdam’’), 192 Munro, Darya (‘‘Neil MacAdam’’), 192 Murder, 154 Murray, Bill, 91, 230 Murray, Hilda (Man of Honour), 149 Murray, Hilda (Merry-Go-Round), 178 Murray, John, 63 Murray, Richard (Hour Before the Dawn), 96 Musee d’Art, 270 Musee Lautrec, 280 Museum of Modern Art, 156, 270, 308 Museum of the Sea, 227 Mussolini, Benito, 18 Mustapha Pasha (‘‘Miss King’’), 181 My Brother Evelyn and Other Profiles, 302 My Cousin Rachel, 262 My Lady’s Dress, 119 My Life and Times (MacKenzie), 143 My South Sea Island, xvi Naipaul, V. S., 260 Nairne, Jack (Noble Spaniard), 195 Nairne, Marion (Noble Spaniard), 195 Napier, Gilbert (‘‘Jane’’), 93, 110 Narragansett, 243 Narrow Corner, The, xv, 22, 37, 90, 101, 105, 190–92, 202, 244 Nash, Vaughan, 62 Nash’s Magazine, 13, 207 Nathan, George Jean, 228 Nation, 267 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 294 National Book League, 317 National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), 274 National Gallery, 53, 239 National Portrait Gallery, 221, 222 National Theatre (Oslo), 99
361
Natives of Rock, 306 ‘‘Neil MacAdam,’’ 1, 40, 192 Neilson (‘‘Red’’), 233 Nelson, Horatio, 266 Nemours, Duc de, 15 Nesbit, Edith, 239 Nesbit, Norah (Of Human Bondage), 200 Nether World, The, 69 Never Say Die, 152 New College, Oxford, 61, 301 New England Baptist Hospital, 154 New Grub Street, 69, 70 New Method English for the Arab World, 141 New Quarterly, 142 New Players Shakespeare, 73 New Republic, 38 New Royalty Theatre, 195 New Statesman, 142 New Theatre, 182, 284, 287 New York City Public Library, 26 New York Herald, 44, 177, 316 New York Herald Tribune, 177 New York Press, 294 New York Sun, 177, 316 New York Times, 294, 316 New York University, 26, 102, 215 New York World, 43, 177, 316 New Yorker, The, 210, 214 New Witness, 142 Newdigate Prize, 309 Newell, James, 228 Newman, John Henry, 170 Newnes Sixpenny Novel Series, 9 Newton, Allgood (Cakes and Ale), 73 Niccolini, Signor (‘‘In a Strange Land’’), 100 Niccolini, Signora (‘‘In a Strange Land’’), 100 Nicholas II, 115 Nichols, John, 192 Nichols, John Beverley, xviii, 119, 192– 93 Nichols, Tom (Narrow Corner), 190, 202, 244 Niehans, Anna, 193 Niehans, Paul, xvi, 193–95, 246, 272, 311, 313
362
INDEX
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 132 Nigger, The, 251 Night and Day, 315 Nightingale, Florence, 264, 268 Nightingale Training School of Nursing, 264 Nobel Prize, vii, 24, 61, 68, 117, 133, 134, 250 Noble Spaniard, The, xvii, 84, 195–96 ‘‘Noblest Act, The,’’ 196 Nocturne, 271 Normal School of Science (London), 305 Normandie, 226 North Carolina, University of, 215 Not So Deep As a Well, 210 Notre Dame de Bonsecours, 258 Notting Hill High School, 98, 266 Nottingham Journal, 236 Novak, Kim, 90, 198 ‘‘Novelist’s Flight from France,’’ 268 Now and Forever, 262 Noyes, Alfred, 295 Number of People, A, 153 Nunhead Cemetery, 168 Nuremberg, Charter of, 160 Nuttall, Zelia, 180 O’Brien (Magician), 145, 197–98 O’Conor, Roderick, xiii, 64, 145, 182, 197–98, 225 O’Donnel, Robert (‘‘Irish Gentleman’’), 103 O’Donnell, Edward (Tenth Man), 276 O’Farrell, Penelope (Penelope), 213, 274 O’Farrell, Richard (Penelope), 213 O’Malley (‘‘His Excellency’’), 89, 114 O’Mara, Gerald (Lady Frederick), 110, 121 Oberon, Merle, 194 Odets, Clifford, 265 Odette (Painted Veil), 207 Odette (Razor’s Edge), 232 Observer, The, 28, 43, 271 Odd Woman, The, 69 Of Human Bondage, xiv, xvii, 20, 33, 35, 37, 38, 56, 64, 66, 69, 75, 76, 85, 89, 90, 93, 114, 117, 135, 141, 144, 145, 163, 172, 175, 198, 198–202, 217,
222, 241, 247, 253, 261, 264, 290, 309, 317 Officers and Gentlemen, 303 ‘‘Official Position, An,’’ 57, 182, 202 Official Secrets Act, 272 Old Century and Seven More Years, 246 Old Dark House, The, 278 Old English, 61 Old Huntsman, 246 Old Man Gariot, 74 ‘‘Old Timer, The,’’ 202 Oldham, Robert (Unattainable), 287 Old Vic Theatre, 27, 51 Olivia (Mr. Pim Passes By), 274 Olivier, Laurence, 182 On a Chinese Screen, xv, 22, 29, 180, 202–3, 214, 219, 273 On Dramatic Method, 73 ‘‘On Going on a Journey,’’ 64 On Poetry in Drama, 73 One Touch of Venus, 214 Ong Chi Sing (‘‘Letter’’), 130, 132 Onions, Oliver, 37 Opium Addict, The, 203 Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 303 Order of Merit, 61, 82, 93, 108, 231 Oria y Mazallon, Vicente (‘‘Spanish Priest’’), 262 Orientations, xiii, 5, 22, 34, 35, 47, 62, 203, 224, 290 Orme, Denise, 279 Ormskirk, Lord (‘‘In a Strange Land’’), 100 Orta y Perez, Catalina (Catalina), 19 Orth, Egon (‘‘Mr. Harrington’s Washing’’), 186 Ortmans, F., 224 Osbourne, Fannie, 244 Osbourne, Lloyd, 244 Otto, Archduke (Up at the Villa), 291 Our Betters, xv, 85, 87, 90, 105, 143, 161, 172, 203–4, 249, 250 Our Man in Havana, 76 Ously-Farrowham, Herbert (‘‘Bad Example’’), 34 Outcasts, The, 255 Outline of History, The, 306 ‘‘Outstation, The,’’ 11, 18, 40, 204–5
INDEX
Owen’s College, Manchester, 69 Ox Bow Incident, The, 285 Oxford Outlook, 193 Oxford University, xvii, 2, 35, 41, 50, 54, 95, 108, 117, 123, 145, 152, 173, 178, 188, 193, 204, 216, 285 P., Major von (‘‘Traitor’’), 282 ‘‘P. & O.,’’ 18, 40, 206 ‘‘Pacific,’’ 83, 206, 284 Page, L. C. and Company, 147, 290 Painted Veil, The, xv, 22, 29, 37, 90, 94, 173, 203, 206–8, 250 Palace, Victor (‘‘Flotsam and Jetsam’’), 50 Pall Mall Gazette, 250 Palma, Mona, 17, 90 Palmer, Archibald (Love in a Cottage), 140 Pantomime, 266 Panton, Mary (Up at the Villa), 85, 291 Panton, Matthew (Up at the Villa), 291 Paoli, Joseph de (‘‘French Joe’’), 58 Paoli, Pasquale de, 58 Paramount Studios, 7, 17, 21, 28, 38, 90, 91, 96, 107, 132, 186, 210, 245, 284, 295, 296 Paravicini, Camilla, xvi, xviii, 148, 158, 208, 209 Paravicini, Nicholas Somerset, xvi, 158, 208, 209 Paravicini, Vincent, xvi, xvii, 148, 158, 208, 209, 256 Parerga und Paralipomena, 246 Paris, University of, 73 Parke Bernet, 261 Parker, Cecil, 226 Parker, Dorothy, xvi, 53, 209–11 Parker, Edwin II, 210 Parker, Eleanor, 90, 198 Parker, Gilbert, 90 Parker-Jennings, Ethel (Jack Straw), 108 Parker-Jennings, Martha (Jack Straw), 107 Parker-Jennings, Robert (Jack Straw), 107 Parker-Jennings, Vincent (Jack Straw), 108 Parnaby, Mrs. (‘‘Flirtation’’), 49
363
Parsons, Frances (Hero), 88, 289 Parsons, James (Hero), 87, 289 Parsons, Richmond (Hero), 87, 289 Partial View, The, 211 Parties, 294 Partridge, Ralph, 268 Passage to India, A, 53 Patchwork, 193 Pater, Walter Horatio, 12, 115, 170 Patmore, Coventry, 72 Paton, Herbert (‘‘Marriages Are Made in Heaven’’), 152 Paton, Leicester (Home and Beauty), 92 Paxton, Anthony (Our Betters), 85, 204 Payne, (Adney) Walter, 134–35, 211 Payne, George Adney, 211 Peacock, Thomas Love, 239 Pear Tree Press, 152 Pearson’s Magazine, 222 Peer Gynt, 99 Pelissier, Henry Gabriel, 27 Pelter, Charmian (‘‘Buried Talent’’), 13 PEN Club, xvi, 68, 211–12 Penelope, xiv, 11, 59, 105, 112, 120, 171, 212–14, 274 Penezzi, Carlo (‘‘Gigolo and Gigolette’’), 67 Penezzi, Flora (‘‘Gigolo and Gigolette’’), 67, 127 Peninsular War, 280 Penny Foolish, 256 People’s Magazine, 121 Peppercorn Algernon (Smith), 257 Peregrine, Eve (‘‘Colonel’s Lady’’), 27 Peregrine, George (‘‘Colonel’s Lady’’), 27 Perelman, Sidney Joseph, 214 Perez, Domingo (Catalina), 19 ‘‘Perfect Gentleman, The,’’ xviii, 171, 214–15, 283–84 Perigal, Robert (Tenth Man), 276 Perkins, Freddie (Mrs. Dot), 188 Perkins, Thomas (Of Human Bondage), 117 Perrier, Annette (‘‘Unconquered’’), 288 Perrier, Madame (‘‘Unconquered’’), 288 Pete, Mr. (‘‘Consul’’), 29 Peter (‘‘Choice of Amyntas’’), 22
364 Peter, Mrs. (‘‘Choice of Amyntas’’), 22 Peter Pan, 27, 59, 136 Peter Whiffle, 294 Peterson (‘‘Raw Material’’), 229 ‘‘Peur, Le,’’ 174 Peyton (Penelope), 112, 213 Pfeiffer, David, 215 Pfeiffer, Karl, vii, 102, 215–16 Pfeiffer, Nellie, 215 Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, 304 Philip (‘‘Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian’’), 224 Philip II, 219 Philip III, 36 Philip IV, 219 Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 239 Philips, Harry, xiii, 9, 55, 171, 216–17 Phoebe (As You Like It), 294 Piacentini, Claudia (Making of a Saint), 147 Piacentini, Ercole (Making of a Saint), 148 Picasso, Pablo, 217 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 132 Pietro (Making of a Saint), 147 Pilar (‘‘Mother’’), 185 Pilgrim Hawk, The, 306 Pilsudski, Josef, 232 Pinchwife, Margery (Country Wife), 71 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 152, 294, 304 Pinker, James Brand, xiii, 9, 164, 217– 18, 303 Piracy, 3 Pirandello, Luigi, 265 Pissaro, Camille, 63, 218 Pissaro, Lucien, 218, 295 Pittsburgh, University of, xviii, 19 Pius XII, 194, 231 Place of One’s Own, A, 279 Plain Tales from the Hills, 117 Playhouse Theatre (London), 17, 29, 91, 131, 203, 207, 241 Plays by W. Somerset Maugham, 87 Plymouth Brethren, 32 Plumed Serpent, The, 129 Poe, Edgar Alan, 220 Poems (Wilde), 309 Poems in a Single Key, 222
INDEX
‘‘Poet, The,’’ 30, 219 Pogson, Mrs. (Home and Beauty), 92 ‘‘Point of Honour, The,’’ 31, 219–20 ‘‘Point of Law, A,’’ 220 Points of View, xviii, 173, 220 Point Valaine, 31 ‘‘Pool, The,’’ 40, 221, 244, 284 Poole, Dorothy (Unknown), 289 Poole, Norman (Unknown), 289 Porchester, Eleanor (‘‘Round Dozen’’), 238 Porhoet, Dr. (Magician), 145 Portable Dorothy Parker, The, 210 Porter-Smith, Fanny (‘‘Pro Patria’’), 223 Porter-Smith, John (‘‘Pro Patria’’), 223 Porteus, Hughie (Circle), 24 Portland Prison, 71 ‘‘Portrait of a Gentleman, The,’’ 30, 221 Portraits, 143 Portraits in Miniature, 268 Positive Hour, The, 311 Posner, David, 222 Pound, Ezra, 54, 98, 143 Pound Wise, 256 Power and the Glory, The, 76 Power, Tyrone, 91, 230 Prabhavananda, Swami, 86 Prater Violet, 104 Prelude, 192 Prelude to Bolshevism, The, 115 Presidential Medal of Freedom, 140 Preston, Ned (‘‘Episode’’), 42 Preston, Ned (‘‘Kite’’), 119 Pretenders, The, 99 Price, Fanny (Of Human Bondage), 199 Price, Mr. (‘‘P. & O.’’), 206 Pride and Prejudice, 74 Priestley, J. B., 86, 119 Prince of Wales Theatre, 83 ‘‘Princess and the Nightingale, The,’’ 223 Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight, 119 ‘‘Princess September,’’ 222–23 Princess September and the Nightingale, 223 Princess Zim-Zim, The, 251 Princeton University, 26, 320 Pringle, Agnes (Land of Promise), 124 Prinsep, Anthony, 136
INDEX
Printer’s Pie Annual, 282 Pritchard (‘‘Treasure’’), 283 Pritchard-Wallace, Mrs. (Hero), 87 Pritchett, V. S., 54, 118, 260 Private Enterprise, 43 Private Lives, 29, 30 ‘‘Pro Patria,’’ 223–24 Prometheus Unbound, 207 ‘‘Promise, The,’’ 30, 224 Proudfoot, Lady (‘‘Cupid and the Vicar of Swale’’), 33 Proudfoot, Lucy (Noble Spaniard), 195 Proudfoot, Matilda (Noble Spaniard), 196 Proudfoot, Sebastian (Noble Spaniard), 196 Proudlock, Mabel, 130 Proust, Marcel, 247 Prynne (‘‘Door of Opportunity’’), 36 Pseudonym Library, 290 Pucci, Piero (Mask and the Face), 155 Puck of Pook’s Hill, 117 Pulitzer Prize, vii, 133, 304, 308 Punch, 33, 121, 122, 132, 163 ‘‘Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian, The,’’ xiii, 171, 203, 224–25, 261 Purely for My Pleasure, xviii, 173, 225 Purification of the Temple, 75 Put Out More Flags, 303 Pygmalion, 136, 250, 283 Quartermaine, Leon, 27 Quartet, xvii, 2, 27, 47, 87, 118, 226, 279 Queen Elizabeth, 227 Queen Mary, 226–27 ‘‘Queen of Time, The,’’ 249 Queen’s College, Oxford, 275 Quiet American, The, 76 Quinn, Mortimer (Point Valaine), 31 R. (Ashenden) 70, 78, 181, 281, 300 Rabenstein, Ferdy (‘‘Alien Corn’’), 2, 127 Rabenstein, Hannah (‘‘Alien Corn’’), 2 Raham, A. B. (Home and Beauty), 92 Railing, Bertram (Bishop’s Apron), 9 ‘‘Rain,’’ xv, 40, 57, 83, 181, 202, 205, 228–29, 244, 284, 296, 308
365
Rain, 35, 40, 90, 172, 228 Rain, and Other Stories, 284 Rainbow, The, 128 Rake’s Progress, A, (Posner), 222 Rakonitz Family, 266 Ramsay, George (‘‘Ant and the Grasshopper’’), 2 Ramsay, Elmer (‘‘Mr. Know-All’’), 186 Ramsay, Mrs. (‘‘Mr. Know-All’’), 186 Ramsay, Tom (‘‘Ant and the Grasshopper’’), 2 Ramsden, Freddy (‘‘Lady Habart’’), 123 Randolph, Clemence, 40, 228 Ranier, xviii Rank, J. Arthur, 2, 27, 42, 226 Raphael, 235 Rathbone, Basil, 8, 10, 41, 288 Ravel, Maurice (‘‘Door of Opportunity’’), 36 ‘‘Ravenna,’’ 309 ‘‘Raw Material,’’ 30, 229–30 Raynor, Jack (Marriages Are Made in Heaven), 152 Razor’s Edge, The, xvii, 28, 37, 38, 48, 56, 57, 85, 86, 88, 91, 93, 101, 102, 105, 109, 144, 154, 173, 202, 216, 218, 230–33, 234, 235, 260, 285, 320 Reader’s Digest, 215 Reagan, Nancy, 320 Reagan, Ronald, 140, 320 Reandean Productions, 35 ‘‘Record of Badalia Herodsfoot, The,’’ 118 Red, 294 ‘‘Red,’’ 40, 93, 233, 244, 284 Red and the Black, The, 74 Redbook, 23, 96, 103, 215, 290 Redburn, 93 Red Cross, xiv, 20, 53, 56, 143, 171, 172, 216, 233–34, 300 Reflections from a Village, 271 ‘‘Reflections on a Certain Book,’’ 293 Redford, Basil, 226 Regina (Ghosts), 100 ‘‘Rehearsal, A,’’ 144, 234 Reid, Venetia (‘‘Winter Cruise’’), 312 Reinhardt, Max, 152 Remarkable Young Man, The, 237
366
INDEX
Remembering Mr. Maugham, 113 Remire, Adele (‘‘Official Position’’), 202 Remire, Louis (‘‘Official Position’’), 202 Renard, Henri (‘‘Man with a Conscience’’), 150 Renard, Jules, 220 Renard, Madame (‘‘Man with a Conscience’’), 150 Rennie, Michael, 91, 245, 284, 295 Renoir, Pierre, 234–35, 255 Repton School, 104, 275 Research Magnificent, The, 306 Resurrection, 75 Return of the Native, The, 81 Reynolds, Joshua, 239 Rhapsody in Gold, 152 Riario, Girolamo (Making of a Saint), 147 Rice, Patrick, 117 Richard Hawkblood, 164 Richardson, Dorother Miller, 62 Richardson, Ralph David, 51 Richman, Beatrice (‘‘Three Fat Women of the Antibes’’), 279 Richmond Theatre, 152 Richter, Herr (Up at the Villa), 291 Richter, Karl (Up at the Villa), 291 Right To Live, The, 90, 235 Rising Gorge, 214 RKO Radio Pictures, 90, 198, 203 Road to Tragedy, The, 115 Road Uphill, The, xv, 120, 235–36 Robert’s Wife, 43 Roberts, Cecil, 236–37 Roberts, Elizabeth, 236 Roberts, John Godber, 236 Robertson, Agnes Kelly, 11 Robinson, Edward G., 114 Robinson, Miss (‘‘String of Beads’’), 269 Robson, Flora Mackenzie, 51 Rock Pool, The, 28 Rocking-Horse Winner, 262 Rogers, Mildred (Of Human Bondage), 35, 69, 89, 93, 200, 217, 241 Rogers, Samuel, 63 Roggeveen, Jacob, 243 Rogue Herries, 300 Rollo, Popper (‘‘De Amicitia’’), 35
Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The, 279 ‘‘Romance,’’ 202 Romance, 251, 252 ‘‘Romantic Young Lady, The,’’ 31, 237 Romer, Elizabeth Lemon, 163 Romer, Mark, 159 Romer, Robert, 159, 163 Room of One’s Own, A, 315 Room with a View, A, 53 Rosalia (‘‘Mother’’), 185 Rosarito, 237–38 Rose, Betty (‘‘Making of a Millionaire’’), 146 Rose, Frederick (‘‘Making of a Millionaire’’), 146 Rose, Leslie (‘‘Making of a Millionaire’’), 146 Rosenbaum (‘‘Straight Flush’’), 268 Rosenberg, Cynthia (Smith), 257 Rosenberg, Otto (Smith), 111, 257 Rosenberg, Paul, 156, 292 Rosenberg, Pom Pom (Smith), 111 Rosenberg, Rachel (Smith), 111 Roses in December, 13 Rosie (‘‘Fortunate Painter’’), 54 Rosmer, Beata (Rosmersholm), 307 Rosmer, Johannes (Rosmersholm), 307 Rosmersholm, 99, 307 Ross, Robert, 310 Rossetti, Christina, 98 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 54, 63 Rothenstein, William, 222 Rothermere, Anne, 49 Rothschild, Eliza, 209 Rothschild, Henry, 209 Rouault, Georges, 156, 238 Rough and Smooth, 166 ‘‘Round Dozen, The,’’ 40, 238, 256 Rouvier, Suzanne (Razor’s Edge), 232 Rowland, Gilbert, 203 Royal Academy, xvii, 114 Royal Academy of Arts, 239 Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, 283 Royal Army Labour Corps, 192 Royal College of Physicians, 171, 264, 265 Royal College of Surgeons, 171, 264, 265, 305
INDEX
Royal Court Theatre, 73, 77, 104, 121 Royal Institute of Chartered Accountants, 211 Royal Institute of International Affairs, 166 Royal Literary Fund, 239, 271 Royal Military College, Sandhurst, 49, 302 Royal Native Oyster Stores, 308 Royal Naval College, 311 Royal Society, xviii, 305 Royal Society of Literature, 24, 54, 173, 239–40, 255 Royalty Theatre, 15, 29, 76, 84, 265 Rudolph, Crown Prince, 127 Rugby School, 117, 188 Rumsey, John, 240 Russell, Cynthia (Smith), 111 Russell, Elizabeth, 260, 293 Russell, Rosiland, 114 Rutgers University, xvii, xviii, 19 Ruth (‘‘Judgment Seat’’), 112 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 241 Sacred and Profane Memories, 294 Sacred Flame, The, xv, 29, 90, 235, 240, 241–43 Sadie Thompson, 90, 228 Sadie Thompson and Other Stories, 284 Saffary, Violet (‘‘Back of Beyond’’), 4 ‘‘Saint, The,’’ 220 Saint Jean-Cap Ferrat, 175 Saint Joan, 250, 279 Sainte-Beuve, Charles, 284 Salon d’Automne, 197 Salon des Independents, 128, 197 Salvation Army, 263 Salvation Nell, 251 Sally (‘‘Red’’), 233 ‘‘Salvatore,’’ 30, 243 Samoa, 221, 243–45 Samuel, Herbert, 239 ‘‘Sanatorium, The,’’ 31, 91, 186, 245, 247, 284, 295 Sanchez, Antonia (‘‘Mother’’), 185 Sanchez, Currito (‘‘Mother’’), 185 Sanders, George, 91, 154, 182 San Domingo, Beatriz de (Catalina), 19
367
San Esteban, Marques de (‘‘Romantic Young Lady’’), 237 San Esteban, Marquesa de (‘‘Romantic Young Lady’’), 237 San Ferdinando, Princess (Up at the Villa), 291 San Ignacio, General (‘‘Man with a Scar’’), 151 San Pietro, Carlo de (‘‘Woman of Fifty’’), 314 San Pietro, Tito de (‘‘Woman of Fifty’’), 314 Santa Ana, Calisto de (‘‘Poet’’), 219 Santaguador, Conchita de (‘‘Point of Honour’’), 219 Santi, Pepe (‘‘Mother’’) 185 Sara, 84, 245–46, 269 Sardou, Victorien, 77 Sassoon, Siegfried, 8, 246 Satirical Poems (Sassoon), 246 Saturday Evening Post, 10, 268, 309 Saturday Review, 8 Saturday Review of Literature, 57 Saunders, Dr. (Narrow Corner), 101, 191, 202 Saunders, Elizabeth (Our Betters), 203 Sauvajon, Marc–Gilbert, 276 Savoy Theatre, 73 Schafer, Wilbur (‘‘His Excellency’’), 88 Schall und Rauch (Rumor and Smoke), 152 Schiffbruchig (Shipwrecked), xiii, 152 Schnepfenthal College, 283 School for Scandal, The, 136 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 66, 170, 246–47 Scoop, 303 Scotland, 247 Scotland Yard, xv, 299 Scribner, Charles, 290 Searle, Alan, vii, xv, xvii, xviii, 41, 42, 49, 56, 66, 92, 95, 105, 110, 118, 137, 158, 159, 165, 173, 176, 184, 195, 227, 239, 247–48, 254, 261, 262, 268, 271, 275, 285, 320 Sebastion, Archduke (Jack Straw), 107 Second Baker’s Dozen, A, 87 Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The, 294 Second World War, The, 24
368
INDEX
Secker, Martin, 68 Secret Agent, 248 Secret City, The, 300 Seguin, Armand, 197 Seldes, Gilbert, 248–49 Selected Novels (Maugham), 87 Self, 193 Self-Portrait (El Greco), 75 Selfridge, Harry Gordon, 161, 249–50 Sellinger, Eleanor (Mrs. Dot), 188 Sellinger, Lady (Mrs. Dot), 189 Sequences, 246 Serena Blandish, 71 Serini, Wanda (Mask and the Face), 155 Serlo, Ned (Jack Straw), 108 Servant, The, 166 ‘‘Servants of God, The,’’ 202 Setta, Marta (Mask and the Face), 155 Seven Lively Arts, The, 249 Seven Seas, The, 117 Seventh Sin, The, 90, 207, 250 Sexual Offences Act, 32 Sforza, Caterina, 147 Shakespeare, William, 27, 51, 59, 73, 148, 304 Shalders, Pauline, 192 Sharp, Emma (Land of Promise), 124 Sharp, Sidney (Land of Promise), 124 ‘‘Shavian,’’ 250 Shaw, 143 Shaw, George Bernard, 8, 54, 61, 73, 77, 99, 132, 136, 137, 212, 250–51, 265, 279, 283, 304 She Stoops to Conquer, 127 Sheldon, Edward, 251–52 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 207 Shenton, Bertie (‘‘Flirtation,’’), 49 Sheppey, xv, 5, 87, 252–53 Sherborne School, 302 Sheridan, Ford (Road Uphill), 235 Sheridan, Joseph (Road Uphill), 235 Sheridan, Mrs. Cornelius (Road Uphill), 235 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 136 Sherriff, Robert Cedric, 2, 27 Sherston’s Progress, 246 Shining and Free, 266 Shipley, A. E., 192
Shirley, Canon F. J., 116, 117, 253–54 ‘‘Short Story, The,’’ 220 Show, 163 Shuttleworth, Mrs. (Home and Beauty), 92 Siam, 254 Sickert, Richard, 184 Siegfried’s Journey, 246 Sierra, Gregorio Martinez, 73 Silver Box, The, 61 Simmons, Jean, 91, 114, 245, 284, 295 Simon and Schuster, 304 Simon Called Peter, 119 Simon, Richard, 304 Simpson, Ernest, 310 Simpson, Jane (‘‘Cupid and the Vicar of Swale’’), 33 Singapore, 254–55 Single Man, A, 104 Sinister Street, 143, 144 Sisley, Alfred, 255 Sister Carrie, 38 Sitwell, Edith, 24, 255, 256, 286 Sitwell, Francis Osbert, 65, 255, 256 Sitwell, George, 286 Sitwell, Sacheverell, 255, 256 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular, xv, 2, 31, 97, 109, 238, 256, 297 Sixpenny, 166 Skelton (‘‘Flotsam and Jestsom’’), 50 Sketch, The, 234 Skin Game, The, 61 Skinner, Cornelia Otis, 276 Skinners (‘‘Before the Party’’), 8 Smart Set, 228, 281 Smile of the World, 113 Smith (Gray), 256 Smith (Maugham), xiv, 11, 12, 77, 105, 111, 136, 137, 171, 256–58, 294 Smith, C. Aubrey, 15, 28 Smith, Lucien (‘‘Rehearsal’’), 234 Smith, Mary (Smith), 257–58 Smithson, Captain (‘‘Lady Habart’’), 110, 111, 123 Snell, Anne, 258 Snell, Anne Alicia Todd, xi, xiii, 157, 258, 259
INDEX
Snell, Charles, xi, 258, 259 Snell, Robert, 258 Snell, Rose Ellen, xi, xii, 258, 259 ‘‘Social Sense, The,’’ 30, 259 Social Substance of Religion, The, 86 Societie Civile Villa Mauresque, 176 Society of Authors, 260 Society of West End Theatre Managers, 211 Soldiers Three, 117 Solicitors’ Journal and Reporter, 168 ‘‘Some Novelists I Have Known,’’ 259– 60, 293, 308 Somerset and All the Maughams, 166 Somerset, Henry, 280 Somerset Maugham, 260 Somerset Maugham Prize, 173, 260 ‘‘Somerset Maugham Theatre, The,’’ 274 Somerville (‘‘Hairless Mexican’’), 78 Something of Myself, 117 ‘‘Song of the River, The,’’ 202 Song of Twilight, A, 31 Sonoma, 244 Sons and Lovers, 128 Sooner or Later, 98 Sotheby, John, 261 Sotheby, Samuel Leigh, 261 Sotheby Parke Bernet (Sotheby’s), vii, xviii, 114, 156, 158, 173, 198, 217, 225, 235, 248, 260–61, 281, 320 Sound of Bow Bells, The, 304 South, Dr. (Of Human Bondage), 201 South Carolina, University of, 26 South of England Junior Tennis Championship, 311 South Sea Bubble, 31 Southey, Robert, 109 Spain, 261–62 Spanish-American War, 219 Spanish Civil War, 210 ‘‘Spanish Priest, The,’’ 261, 262 Spencer, Earl Winfield, 310 Spencer, Herbert, 132 Spender, Stephen, 28, 104 Spectator, 267 ‘‘Sphinx, The,’’ 132 Spider Boy, 294 Spina, Luciano (Mask and the Face), 155
369
Spinoza, Baruch, 199, 201 Spratte, Lionel (Bishop’s Apron), 9 Spratte, Sophia (Bishop’s Apron), 9 Spratte, Theodore (Bishop’s Apron), 9, 33 Spratte, Theodore (Loaves and Fishes), 136, 138 Spratte, Thomas (Bishop’s Apron), 9 Spratte, Winnie (Bishop’s Apron), 9 Squire, Ronald, 12, 262–63 Squirrel’s Cage, 311, 312 St. Andrews University, 43 St. Clair, Edwin (‘‘Round Dozen’’), 238 St. Clair, Gertrude (‘‘Round Dozen’’), 238 St. Erth, Duke of (‘‘Promise’’), 224 St. Francis of Assisi, 75, 164 St. George’s Hospital, 4 St. Helier, Susan Marie, 81, 263, 308 St. James’s Episcopal Church (New York), 307 St. James’s, Piccadilly, 275 St. Laurent du Maroni, French Guiana, xvi, 23, 57, 150, 202 St. Margaret’s Church, 158 St. Mark’s Church, 161, 305 St. Mary’s of Bethlehem Hospital, 253 St. Mary’s School, 140 St. Paul’s School, 143, 273 St. Teresa, 36 St. Thomas’s Hospital, vii, xii, xiii, 5, 22, 62, 72, 100, 105, 134, 165, 169, 171, 180, 195, 211, 216, 263–65, 290, 310 Stage Society (London), 73, 77, 108, 149, 265, 317 Stamboul Train, 76 Stammering Century, The, 249 Stanford University, 2, 26, 110 Stanley, Constantine, 263 Stanley, Dorothy, 263 Stanley, Henry Morton, 44 Star, 250 Starling, Miss (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 80 Stars and Stripes Forever, 285 Steegman, Philip, 222 Steel, Flora, 263 Steevens, Christina, 10, 112, 121, 266, 285 Steevens, George W., 10, 121, 266
370
INDEX
Stein, Gertrude, 294 Stendahl, 74 Stephen, Julia Duckworth, 315 Stephen, Leslie, 315 Stephens, Dr. (‘‘Happy Man’’), 80 Stern, Albert, 266 Stern, Elizabeth, 266 Stern, Gladys, 266–67 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 86, 118, 179, 244, 245, 267 Stevenson, Thomas, 267 Steward, William Crozier, 130 Stewart, Valentia (‘‘De Amicitia’’), 35 Stewart-Mackenzie, Keith, 263 ‘‘Still Life with Vegetables,’’ 198 Stoddard, Cynthia (Gin and Bitters), 68 Story of the Nations Series, 290 Strachey, Giles Lytton, 247, 267–68, 315 ‘‘Straight Flush,’’ 30, 268 Strand, The, 103, 220 Strand Theatre, 28 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The, 267 Stratton, Captain (‘‘Door of Opportunity’’), 36 Stratton, Collie (For Services Rendered), 52 Strauss, Richard, 214 Stravinsky, Igor (‘‘Door of Opportunity’’), 36 Straw, Jack (Jack Straw), 107 Strickland, Amy (Moon and Sixpence), 26, 69, 182 Strickland, Charles (Moon and Sixpence), 12, 22, 64, 69, 172, 182 Strictly Personal, xvi, 20, 268–69 Strictly Unconventional, 24, 90, 269 ‘‘String of Beads, A,’’ 30, 269 Stroeve, Blanche (Moon and Sixpence), 183 Stroeve, Dirk (Moon and Sixpence), 183 Strong, Edith (‘‘Cupid and the Vicar of Swale’’), 33 Stuart, Otho, 121 Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe, 72 Sudermann, Hermann, 66, 100
Summing Up, The, xvi, 143, 211, 214, 269–70 Sunbury, Beatrice (‘‘Kite’’), 118 Sunbury, Betty Bevan (‘‘Kite’’), 118 Sunbury, Herbert (‘‘Kite’’), 118 Sunbury, Samuel (‘‘Kite’’), 118 Sunday Chronicle, 193 Sunday Express (London), xviii, 7, 59, 137, 163 Sunday Special (London), 77 Sunday Sun (London), 70 Sunday Times (London), 49, 72, 77, 142, 193 Sunflower, 307 Sunlit Caribbean, The, 302 Sunset Gun, 210 Sun Yat-sen, 22 Surennes, Gaston de (Our Betters), 204 Surennes, Minnie de (Our Betters), 85, 204 Survival League, 212 Sussex, 82 Sussex, Duke of, 63 Sutcliffe, Arrow (‘‘Three Fat Women of the Antibes’’), 279 Sutherland, Graham, xvii, 24, 222, 270– 71 Swalecliffe, William (Tenth Man), 276 Swales, Frank, 249 Swan, Jack (Narrow Corner), 191 Swanson, Gloria, 90, 194, 228 Sweet Bye and Bye, 214 Swete, E. Lyall, 195 Swift, Edgar (Up at the Villa), 291 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 72, 170 Swinnerton, 271 Swinnerton, Frank, 37, 271 Switzerland, 271–72 Sylvanus Thayer Award, 140 Symons, Arthur, 295 Synthesism, 63–64 Tabret, Colin (Sacred Flame), 242 Tabret, Maurice (Sacred Flame), 242 Tabret, Millie (Sacred Flame), 242 Tabret, Stella (Sacred Flame), 242 Tahiti, 64, 182, 273 Tail, Emil, 64
INDEX
‘‘Taipan, The,’’ 273–74 Taitbout, Jane (Theatre), 277 Take a Golden Spoon, 152 Taken Care Of, 255 Tales of the Uneasy, 98 Taming of the Shrew, 60 Tanaka, Matsuo, 110 Tangatu (‘‘Mackintosh’’), 144 Tarride, Abel, 284 Tassignay, Jean Marie, 56 Tate Gallery, 156, 222, 270, 271 Tauchnitz, Christian Bernhard, 86 Taylor, Elizabath, 194 Taylor, Frank (Land of Promise), 124 Taylor, Jeremy, 72 Tearle, Godfrey, 275 Ted (For Services Rendered), 52 Tehura, 64 Teazle, Lady (School for Scandal), 136 ‘‘Teller of Tales,’’ 274 Tempest, Marie, 49, 59, 188, 213, 274 Temple, Frederick, 275 Temple, William, 275 Templeton, Elliott (Razor’s Edge), 21, 109, 231–32, 234, 320 Templeton, George (‘‘Sanatorium’’), 245 Ten Novels and Their Authors, 49, 74, 173 Tenace, 130 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 72, 150 Tenth Man, The (Greene), 76 Tenth Man, The (Maugham), xiv, 77, 171, 275–76 Tents of Israel, 266 Terry, Ellen, 304 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 81 Texas, University of, xviii, 20, 26, 261, 320 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 54, 63 Theatre (MacCarthy), 143 Theatre (Maugham), xvi, 37, 56, 100, 104, 127, 128, 274, 276–77, 294 Theatre Arts, xviii, 214 Theatre Guild (New York), 155 Theatre Royal, 294 Theatre Royal, 274 Then and Now, xvii, 37, 106, 173, 278
‘‘There was a Knight of Bethlehem,’’ 164 Thesiger, Ernest, 24, 278–79 ‘‘They Also Serve,’’ 177, 279 They Drive by Night, 279 Thin Ice, 143 Thinking Reed, The, 307 Third Day, The, 154 Third Man, The, 76 Third Morality, The, 86 This Real Night, 307 This Week, 177, 196, 279 Thomas, Dylan, 239 Thompson, Francis, 295 Thompson, Miss, 244 Thompson, Sadie (‘‘Rain’’), 229, 244 Thompson, Sadie (Rain), 40, 229 Thorne, Sarah, 73, 294 Thousand Summers, A, 113 ‘‘Three Fat Women of the Antibes, The,’’ 182, 279–80 Three for the Show, 91, 280 Three Hundred Club, 265 Three Musicians, The, 217 Three Musketeers, The, 137 Tichburne Case, The, 160 Tierney, Gene, 91, 230 Tiger Skin, The, 98 Tiger, Tiger, 119 Tillotson, John, 220 Time and Tide, 54 Time Machine, The, 305 Times (London), 76, 182, 256, 287 Times Bookshop, 271 Times Literary Supplement, 125, 315 Titian, 74 To the Lighthouse, 315 Todd, Francis, 258, 280 Todd, Henry Somerset, 280 Tolstoy, Leo, 74, 247 Tom (Liza of Lambeth), 135 Tom Jones, 74 Tomorrow Club, 212 Tompkins, Laurence, 222 Tonbridge School, 53 Tone, Franchot, 96 Too Early to Tell, 304 Too Many Husbands, xv, 91, 280
371
372
INDEX
Toole Theatre, 299 Torel, Alban (‘‘Door of Opportunity’’), 36 Torel, Anne (‘‘Door of Opportunity’’), 36 Toulouse, University of, 173 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 280–81 Tower, Marion (‘‘Jane’’), 110 Tower, Willie (Jane), 8, 109, 263 Town Like Alice, A, 136 Towne, Charles Hanson, xv, 281 Towne, Mary, 281 Towne, Paul, 281 Townsend, Charlie (Painted Veil), 207 Townsend, Dorothy (Painted Veil), 207 Trabuco College, 86 Trail, Grace (Up at the Villa), 291 Train of Powder, A, 307 ‘‘Traitor, The,’’ 3, 40, 281–82 Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, 240 ‘‘Traveller in Romance, A,’’ 282 Traveller’s Library, 282–83 ‘‘Treasure, The,’’ 18, 182, 283 Treasure Island, 267 Tree, Herbert Draper Beerbohm, 8, 63, 111, 137, 283–84 Trembling of a Leaf, The, xiv, 37, 48, 83, 94, 144, 172, 206, 221, 228, 233, 284 Trench, Isabella (Unattainable), 287 Trevelyan, George Macaulay, 54, 240 Trinity College, Cambridge, 32, 72, 142, 159, 166, 267 Trinity College, Dublin, 309 Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 114 Trio, xvii, 91, 186, 245, 284, 295 Trip to Brighton, A, 284 ‘‘Trip to Paris, A,’’ 3 Trippe and Company, 284–85 Tritton, Robert, 247, 285 Trois Jeunes Filles, 235 Trollope, Anthony, 54, 63 Trotter, Benjamin (Land of Promise), 124 Trotti, Lamar, 230, 285 Trouble in Paradise, 154 Truth and Nation, 271 Truth about the Munich Crisis, The, 160 Tuckerton Beacon, 165 Tunney, Gene, 118
Turkey, 285 Turner, Ernest (Sheppey), 252 Turner, Reginald, 93, 129, 285–86, 306, 310 Turner, Violet (‘‘Taipan’’), 274 Tusitala, 244 Twelfth Hour, The, 133 Twelve Poems (Wharton), 308 Twentieth-Century Fox, 91, 218, 230, 285 Twenty-Five, 193 Twos and Threes, 266 Tyler, George C., 12, 41, 121, 286 Unattainable, The, xv, 87, 271, 287–88 Unconditional Surrender, 303 ‘‘Unconquered, The,’’ 31, 288 Une Rue au Conquent, 292 Une Vie, 174 United Artists, xvi, 90, 91, 182 United Seamen’s Service, 215 United States, 226 United States and the War, The, 249 Universal Pictures, 23, 91 University College, Nottingham, 128, 236 University College, Oxford, 82 Unknown, The, xiv, 10, 87, 88, 143, 288– 89, 316 U.N.O. and War Crimes, 160 Unwin, Stanley, 290 Unwin, Thomas Fisher, xiii, 5, 34, 47, 62, 87, 134, 147, 203, 289–90 Up at the Villa, xvi, 85, 104, 106, 173, 290–92 Upward, Edward Falaise, 104 Use of Drama, The, 73 Utrillo, Maurice, 292 Utrillo, Miguel, 292 Vagrant Mood, The, xvii, 83, 153, 173, 259, 293, 308 Vailima Letters, 244, 267 Valadon, Suzanne, 292 Vanbrugh, Irene, 11, 123, 126, 136, 256, 287, 294 Vanbrugh, Violet, 294 Vanderbilt Theatre, 17 Vanessa, 300
INDEX
Van Gogh, Vincent, 63 Van Hasseldt (‘‘Door of Opportunity’’), 37 Vanity Fair, 32, 140, 210 Van Vechten, Carl, xv, 294–95 Variety Theatres Consolidated, 211 Vaudeville Theatre, 12, 84, 107, 137 Vaudrey, Betty (Mrs. Craddock), 187 Vaudrey, General (Mrs. Craddock), 188 Vaudrey, Gerald (Mrs. Craddock), 188 Vaughan, Gilbert Hereford (Limit, The), 68, 133 Veda, 230 Vedanta, 86, 105 Vedrenne, John E., 77 Vega, Lope Felix de, 36 Velasquez, Diego, 36 Vellay, Julie, 218 Venture, xiii, 98, 152, 295 Vereeniging, Treaty of, 10 ‘‘Verger, The,’’ 30, 91, 186, 245, 284, 295–96 Vermont, Elizabeth (‘‘Promise’’), 224 Vermont, Peter, (‘‘Promise’’), 224 Verne, Jules, 214 Vernon, Helen (Landed Gentry), 126 Vernon, Mary (Landed Gentry), 127 ‘‘Vessel of Wrath, The,’’ 1, 7, 40, 91, 296–97 Vestal Fire, 143 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 79 Victoria Palace, Ltd., 211 Victoria, Queen, vii, xiii, 67, 264, 268, 305 View of Toldeo, 75 Vigils, 246 Vile Bodies, 303 ‘‘Villa on the Hill, The,’’ 290 Virgil, 103 Virgin and the Gypsy, The, 129 Virgin Queen, The, 154 Virginia, University of, 301 ‘‘Virtue,’’ 40, 256, 297 Vivyan, Lottie (‘‘Marriages Are Made in Heaven’’), 152 Vizard, Marguerite (Merry-Go-Round), 178 Vlaminck, Maurice de, 156, 238
373
Vogue (London), 129 Vogue (New York), 140 ‘‘Voice of the Turtle, The,’’ 127, 182, 297–98, 312 Voltaire, Franc¸ois-Marie, 160 Von Higgins, Baroness (‘‘Miss King’’), 181 Von Scheidlin, Baron, 169 Voronoff, Serge, 193 Voska, Emanuel, 185 Voyage Out, The, 315 Voysey Inheritance, The, 73 Waddington (Painted Veil), 207 Wagner, Wilhelm Richard, 246 Wain, John, 260 Walker (‘‘Mackintosh’’), 144, 244 Walks in Rome, 82 Wall, Richard, 23 Waller, Lewis, 45, 299 Wallinger, John Arnold, 299–300 Wallinger, W.H.A., 299 Walpole, G.H.S., 300 Walpole, Hugh, xiv, xv, 16, 37, 53, 54, 59, 65, 68, 81, 115–16, 133, 300–301 Walton, William 255 Wanderings in Spain, 82 Wanley, Lady (Jack Straw), 107 War and Peace, 74 War of the Worlds, 305 Warburton, George (‘‘Outstation’’), 204 Ward, Edward, 264 Wardour Films, 275 Waring and Gillow, 249 Waring, Samuel, 249 Warner Brothers, 90, 91, 104, 105, 132, 190, 198, 235, 291 Warner Studios, 90, 242 Warren (Magician), 145, 185 Washington and Jefferson College, 236 Washington (D.C.) College for Girls, 177 Washington Post, 177 Washington Square Players, 29 Washington, State College of, 215 ‘‘Wash-Tub, The,’’ 30, 301–2 Waste, 73 Waterford, Rose (Cakes and Ale), 98 Watkins, Vernon Phillips, 104
374
INDEX
Watson, Rev. (Of Human Bondage), 117 Watt, Alexander Pollock, xvii, 302 Watteau, Jean Andre, 54, 234 Waugh, Alexander (Alec) Raban, xv, 302, 303 Waugh, Alexander Auberon, 303 Waugh, Arthur, 302, 303 Waugh, Evelyn, xv, 302, 303 Waves, The, 315 Wayland, Beatrice (Sacred Flame), 242 Way of Marriage, The, 98 Weald of Youth, The, 246 Webb, Clifton, 230 Webster, Benjamin, 149, 303–4 Webster, Benjamin Nottingham, 303 Wedekind, Frank, 265 Wedgwood, Cicely, 260 Weekley, Ernest, 128 Weidman, Jerome, 111, 216, 304 Weir of Hermiston, 244, 267 Wellcome, Henry (the younger), 161, 304, 305 Wellcome, Henry Solomon, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, 161, 172, 304–5 Wellcome, Mary Curtis, 304 Wellcome, Solomon Cummings, 304 Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research, 305 Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, 305 Wellcome Laboratories, 305 Wellcome Museum of Medical Science, 305 Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories, 305 Welldon-Burns, Betty (‘‘Human Element’’), 97 Welldon-Burns, James (‘‘Human Element’’), 97 Wellington, Duke of, 280 Wellington School, 117 Wells, Catherine Robbins, 305 Wells, H. G., 54, 61, 69, 73, 86, 98, 129, 132, 201, 212, 218, 260, 286, 293, 305– 6, 307 Wells, Isabel, 305 Wescott, Glenway, 33, 53, 162, 222, 306– 7, 308
West, Anthony, 307 West, Florence, 299 West, Rebecca, 98, 143, 305, 306, 307 Westcott, Sandy (‘‘Gigilo and Gigolette’’), 67 West End Wives, 278 Westminster Abbey, 16, 275 Wharton, Edith, 260, 263, 293, 308 Wharton, Evelyn (Unknown), 289 Wharton, George (Unknown), 289 Wharton, John (Unknown), 289 Wharton, Mary (‘‘Social Sense’’), 259 Wharton, Thomas (‘‘Social Sense’’), 259 What’s in It for Me?, 304 Wheeler, Bananas (‘‘Honolulu’’), 94 Wheeler, Monroe, 307, 308 Wheels, 255 Wheels within Wheels, 302 Where Angels Fear To Tread, 53 Where the Clock Chimes Twice, 302 While the Sun Shines, 262 Whisky Galore, 143 Whistler, James, 184 White, Ferdinand (‘‘De Amicitia’’), 35 White Peacock, The, 128 White Queen (Alice in Wonderland), 294 ‘‘White Period,’’ 292 White Rose of Weary Leaf, 98 White Star Line, 226 Whitefield, Mrs. (Man and Superman), 136 Whiteside, Sheridan (Man Who Came to Dinner), 316 Whitstable, Kent, xii, 34, 116, 117, 159, 163, 164, 169, 170, 308–9 Whitty, May, 304 ‘‘Why Do You Dislike Us?,’’ 309 Wichelow, Alice, 53 Wickham, Dorothy (Land of Promise), 124 Wickham, James (Land of Promise), 124 Wickham, Louisa (Land of Promise), 124 Wiehe, Evelyn May Clowes, xv, 68 Wilberforce, Albert Basil, 82 Wild Duck, The, 99 Wilde, Cyril, 309 Wilde, Jane, 309 Wilde, Oscar, xii, xiii, 12, 17, 27, 32, 93,
INDEX
132, 138, 143, 152, 285, 286, 294, 309– 10 Wilde, Vyvyan, 309 Wilde, William, 309 Wilkes, Charles, 243 Wilkins (‘‘Marriage of Convenience’’), 151 Wilkins, Mrs. (‘‘Marriage of Convenience’’), 151 Wilkinson, Emily (Of Human Bondage), 175, 199 Wilkinson, Rev. (Of Human Bondage), 199 Williams, David, 239 Williams, John, 243 Williams, John D., 203 Willie (‘‘Unconquered’’), 288 Wilson, 285 Wilson, Angus, 222 Wilson, Edmund, 117 Wilson, Peter, 261 Wilson, Thomas (‘‘Lotus-Eater’’), 13, 138–39 Wilson, Woodrow, 31, 313 Winchester School, 301 ‘‘Windmill, The,’’ 19 Windsor, Bessie Wallis, Duchess of, xvi, 256, 310–11 Windsor, Edward, Duke of, xvi, 194, 310, 311 Wingfield, Miss (‘‘Happy Couple’’), 79, 80 Wingford, Miss (‘‘Happy Couple), 80 Wings of the Eagle, The, 249 Winn, Charles, 311 Winn, Godfrey, xv, 303, 311–12 Winslow Boy, The, 136 Winston, John C., 74 Winstonburg Line, The, 256 Winter, Catherine (Tenth Man), 275 Winter, George (Tenth Man), 275–76 Winter (‘‘Honolulu’’), 94 ‘‘Winter Cruise,’’ 31, 42, 312–13 Winter Landscape, 218 Wiseman, William, 313 Wisinger, Claire, 211 Wisinger, Ida, 211 Wisinger, Mor, 211
375
With a Song in My Heart, 285 Withers, George, 24 Withers, Googie, 313 Witherspoon, Herbert (‘‘His Excellency’’), 88 With Kitchener to Khartoun, 10 Wolf, Max, xvi, 227, 313–14 Wolfe, Thomas, 58 Wolmark, Alfred, 314 Woman Hater, 262, 314–15 ‘‘Woman of Fifty, A,’’ 31, 314–15 Woman of the World, 276 Woman’s Magazine, 177 Women, The, 140 Women in Love, 128 Women’s Defense Relief Corps, 212 Women’s Wear Daily, 320 Women Writers’ Suffrage League, 97–98 Wood, Natalie, 114 Woolf, Leonard, 267, 315 Woolf, Virginia, 53, 65, 104, 125, 315– 16 Woollcott, Alexander, 71, 316 Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind, 306 Workers in the Dawn, 69 World, 250 World in the Evening, The, 104 ‘‘World of Somerset Maugham, The,’’ 249 Wormwood Scrubs, 42, 118 Worthley, Frances (Mrs. Dot), 188, 274 Wren, Christopher, 223 Wright, Haidee, 289, 316 Writer’s Notebook, A, xvii, 173, 211, 241, 316–17 Writer’s Point of View, The, xvii, 317 W. Somerset Maugham (1925), 37 W. Somerset Maugham (Pfeiffer), 216 W. Somerset Maugham Selects, 74 Wuthering Heights, 74 Wycherley, William, 71 Wylford, Muriel, 149, 304, 317 Wyndham, Charles, 45, 284 Wyndham, Violet, 132 Wyndham’s Theatre, 252 Wynne, Clement (Land of Promise), 125
376 Yale University, xvi, xviii, 20, 26 , 133, 202, 230, 261, 294 Years of the Locust, The, 249 Yeats, William Butler, 103, 290 Yellow Book, 132 Yellow Chair, The, 156 Yellow Sands, 274 ‘‘Yellow Streak, The,’’ 11, 18, 40, 318– 19 Yemasse, South Carolina, 38, 210, 222 Yogananda, Paramhansa, 101 You Never Can Tell, 265 Young Matriarch, The, 266 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 247, 275 Young Mr. Lincoln, 285 Young Queen, The, 311 Yu, Mr. (‘‘Consul’’), 29
INDEX
Yu, Mrs. (‘‘Consul’’), 29 Yuan Shikai, 22 Yvonne (‘‘His Excellency’’), 89
Z., Professor, (‘‘Mr. Harrington’s Washing’’), 186 Zanotti, Cirillo (Mask and the Face), 155 Zanotti, Elisa (Mask and the Face), 155 Zanuck, Darryl, 218 Zampa, Genevieve (‘‘Rehearsal’’), 234 Zampa, Rene-Antoine (‘‘Rehearsal’’), 234 Zipkin, Annette, 320 Zipkin, David, 320 Zipkin, Jerome, 37, 111, 261, 320–21 Zoffany, Johann, 321 Zola, Emile, 55 , 69 Zubaran, Francisco de, 262, 293
About the Author SAMUEL J. ROGAL is Chair of the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts at Illinois Valley Community College. He has written some 150 articles, and his more than 25 books include A Companion to the Characters in the Fiction of W. Somerset Maugham (1966), Sing Glory and Hallelujah! Historical and Biographical Guide to ‘‘Gospel Hymns Nos. 1 to 6 Complete’’ (1966), Agriculture in Britain and America, 1660–1820: An Annotated Bibliography of the Eighteenth Century Literature (1994), Medicine in Great Britain from the Restoration to the Nineteenth Century, 1660–1800 (1992), A Chronological Outline of American Literature (1987), A Guide to the Hymns and Tunes of American Methodism, 1878–1964 (1986), The Children’s Jubilee: A Bibliographical Survey of Hymnals for Infants, Youths and Sunday Schools Published in Britain and America, 1655–1900 (1983), and A Chronological Outline of British Literature (1980), all published by Greenwood.