A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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).

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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).

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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).

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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

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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

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‘‘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,

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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.

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‘‘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

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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

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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-

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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*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).

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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

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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.

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†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

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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

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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

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(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.

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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

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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).

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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†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

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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

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*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.

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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’’

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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‘‘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,

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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.

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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-

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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

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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

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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-

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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

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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

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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-

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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

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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

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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-

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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.

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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-

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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.

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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

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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-

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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,

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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

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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

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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,

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*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

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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

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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

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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-

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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*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.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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. . . .

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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

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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

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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-

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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-

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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,

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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

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*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,

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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

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(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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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-

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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

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(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

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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,

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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

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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*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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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†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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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,

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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

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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