Maugham

Mr. Maugham’s secretary, Alan Searle, answered the door and told me that Mr. Maugham was still taking his nap. He apologized and left me to wait and tremble. I can still see the room, the two soft sofas set on either side of a dead fireplace in a parody of a country house living room, the muted colors of expensive cloth, the heavy silk curtains, the reproductions of antiques, the soundless carpet. I began to relax. Nothing makes me feel more secure than the rich anonymity of a luxury hotel room. I was at that point living in a communal house with bare floors in Chelsea where color covered poverty, and visual wit emptiness. I found such dumb pastel luxury, even through the nervousness, a comfort.

Mr. Maugham came and stood for a second in the door. He was small, shy, and plump. He was dressed in old tweeds with patches at the elbows. The down-turned lines by his mouth were gone. He was smiling. He called me “my dear,” and not once in the three hours that followed did he stammer. Now I must find his voice, or his voice for that day, and this is the way I remember it.

He said, “My dear, I know why you’re here,” as if we had met in Aladdin’s cave, which, for me, we had, there on that cozy warm late afternoon in London with the early evening lowering outside. “Now, let me see the layouts. We can get these out of the way.” He sat down on one of the sofas with the layouts on a coffee table in front of him. There were two full pages, and he went through them as if he were reading captions already there. “Let’s see now. What on earth would I have been saying when I looked like that? Something about America, I think. They (the mysterious they) always like for me to say something about America. Youamericans”—that single English word for us—“are so self-conscious, my dear.”

So he went through picture after picture. “Something about France. They always like something about France…and sex…and changes in the world….” When he had finished he handed the layouts to me and lounged back on the sofa. I could hear the tea cart rumbling along the hall outside. The whole process, including the arrival of tea, had taken less than half an hour. When that cozy rite was done and the waiter had left, he said with a sigh, as if he had been doing the washing, “Now that’s done, my dear. We can talk. Tell me about yourself.”

What could I tell him? That I had worked for fashion magazines? That I had been in the war? That I was working every day in the Reading Room of the British Museum on a novel that I had no hope for, since novels about history were denigrated as unfashionable? My other two unpublished novels? My six unproduced plays? No, nothing to tell. He didn’t wait for me to tell him nothing.

“I love my yearly visit to London,” he said for a beginning, and then he went on for most of the afternoon, as the night came down outside. He was anecdotal, entertaining, warm, and, dare I say, sweet—but he really was, the man with the reputation of a snapping turtle. I was embarrassed at staying so long, but he charmed me into staying. I realize as I write, so many years later, that Alan Searle had gone out and that Mr. Maugham did not want to be left alone. He was old. He had a new and very willing ear, unjudging and young. I was baby-sitting.

I forgot that it was an “interview” and simply asked questions gleaned from the homework I had done. I wanted to know why, with all the successful plays that he had written, he had let someone else write the most memorable, Rain. He was a conjurer. We were not in London in the dim afternoon. We were in Hollywood in 1920: white Spanish houses, sand, palms, sunshine, Keystone Cops, and Pearl White. He sat one evening, he said, on the patio of the Garden of Allah, the legendary cluster of cottages where visiting writers stayed in the early days of silent Hollywood.

“John Colton,” he said, “was a friend of mine who was staying there, too. He came out and sat down beside me, and told me that he had not slept for several nights. He looked terrible, dark circles and all. I had the proofs of a book of short stories that had just come in the mail for me. I threw it to him, and said, ‘Here, these will put you to sleep.’

“The next morning he came out on the patio again. He looked worse. ‘Dammit, Willy, I haven’t slept a wink, he told me. Why haven’t you made a play of that story, Sadie Thompson?’ Now, you must understand that I of all people knew what a play was. After all, I had three hit plays running in London at the same time. I told him so. He asked me if he could try. I said, ‘Of course, but you’re wasting your time.’

“When the play he called Rain opened in Boston you could have bought it for five thousand dollars. It ran for six years and killed the loveliest actress I have ever known, Jeanne Eagels. I saw her one evening play a glorious performance, and when she came offstage she fainted. She had been playing with a safety pin stabbing her in the side, and when we undressed her, the blood had nearly soaked through her clothes.”

Sometimes he didn’t wait for me to ask a question. “I know what you’re going to ask. I know you’re here because I’m eighty next week. Changes in the world, they always ask about changes in the world.” He jumped up. “Now I know you expect me to talk about wars, and all that. But you forget that I was trained as a doctor. No. Not war. The modern contraceptive. That’s what has changed the world. In the old days”—he began to play an imaginary game of tennis around the room—“we lobbed the ball gently over the net so the lady we were playing with could hobble over gracefully and lob it back. Now!” His face changed. He crouched down. “We stand at back center court and fight for our lives!”

I did get a question in then. I asked him what it felt like to publish his first book in 1897, the same year the greats like Henry James, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling were bringing out some of their most famous novels.

“Oh, were they?” he said vaguely. “My dear, we weren’t paying any attention to them. We were reading George Meredith. He was our god. We all learned from him. Nobody reads Meredith now. You can tell from the bad prose. Conrad? James? Oh come, come, who were they? It was Meredith. Have you read him?” I was afraid to say no. “I can see you haven’t. Read him. You read Meredith.”

He said, “You know, one of my pleasures when I come on my visit to London is to meet some of the new writers. Now, there is a young man called Angus Wilson. I would love to meet him. Do you know him?”

I was able to tell him with some just pride that I saw Angus Wilson every day. He was still working in the Reading Room, and writing at night and on weekends. I knew he was working on a novel. I was even so bemused by the afternoon’s warmth that I thought it possible to suggest that I give them both dinner.

“My dear, that is kind. But you see, I don’t really like to go out at night, and I think it best if you brought Mr. Wilson here for luncheon. Now where would I write to invite him?”

I’m afraid that the next morning I gushed: “Everybody is wrong about Mr. Maugham. He’s as benign as Santa Claus. He wants to meet you. I told him you were working very hard on a book but that you might.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Angus Wilson said, with less ecstasy and more irony.

Even in the taxi to the Dorchester that day, I babbled on about the magic coincidence of my book being accepted on such a day, and about what a surprise Mr. Maugham was going to be to him. There were no more fears when I called Alan Searle and told him we were there.

Maugham stood a few feet behind Alan Searle, framed by the room. He was his portrait and his reputation. He wore another face—reptilian, defensive, cold. His clothes were de rigueur for bankers in the city: the black jacket, the pinstriped trousers, the dead-white collar, the black tie with daring faint stripes. Outside of shaking hands, he never spoke to me but twice in the next two terrible hours. I had brought Angus Wilson into a literary lion’s den. I was a Chinese go-between, nothing else. We all sat down on the two sofas. Searle poured martinis from a pitcher.

I realized, of course, what had happened. Angus Wilson was a rival and a threat. I had not been. I had been an interlude, probably forgotten. Wilson was, for that day, all the enemies that paranoid man had had to contend with during his later writing life. Unfair? Of course it was unfair. Wilson was and is the most generous critic and writer in England, more helpful to the young than Maugham ever thought of being, a fine stylist, a natural teacher. I can still hear his voice as, in casual conversation at the Reading Room, he would give me clue after clue, generous and subtle and right. One was that genius can only be imitated, not learned from—“Study Stacy O’Maunier to learn to construct a short story,” I hear him say. “Craft. That’s what we can learn from other writers, not genius.”

But that day, as a new contender in that arena I did not yet know, he had to fight. I hardly remember Maugham taking his eyes off him. Question after question. There was not a leading writer who had visited his house in Cap Ferrat that Maugham did not destroy. My idols and mentors fell, one after another. He accused this one of drunkenness, that one of dirty habits, T. S Eliot of stealing his books. Alan Searle and I just looked at each other and drank martinis.

At last I heard the lunch trolley being wheeled down the hall, and the waiter came in and set up a table in the room.

Maugham sat at its head, Searle at the foot, Wilson and I at either side. By the time lunch came Maugham was stammering so badly that I could see that part of the arrogant head-thrown- back look was his habitual attempt to recover his voice. He had one of the worst stammers I have ever heard, and, needless to say, I wouldn’t have dared open my mouth had he given me a chance to.

Finally, though, he looked at me, from high above my face. “We’re having p-p-p-p-partridge for lunch,” he said. “Would you like i-i-i-ice cream or ch-ch-cheese to follow?”

Very very carefully, I said, “Cheese.”

He put his nose very close to Wilson’s face, and, a little ominously, he asked, “Ch-ch-cheese or i-i-i-ice cream?”

Wilson said, “Cheese.”

“You know,” the voice was gossipy, not imperious for a minute, “F-f-f-f-frank S-s-s-s-swinnerton was here the other day. He said—ice cream!”

Wilson said, “Really? I shouldn’t have thought he was that sort of man.”

It was like that all through lunch: every remark weighed and weighed again; all the signs secret among the English, the Literati, and the Accepted, were brought out, tested, some found wanting, and some passed, as was the cheese.

At one point, having bullied the absent, there was a shift. It was time, almost formally, to bully Alan Searle.

“My dear,” he said, but the phrase was no longer kind, “Alan here knows everybody worth knowing. Alan knew Festing Jones!”

I didn’t realize that this was supposed to be a joke. I had just been reading Samuel Butler, and Festing Jones was his close friend. I was delighted to be able to talk to Searle. “Did you really?” I said. “Was it true that Butler asked him and another friend to spread his ashes over Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a final joke? I see two old men in their top hats, dancing around, strewing ashes.”

Maugham was furious, like a child. He commanded a dead silence at the table. Angus Wilson came to the rescue, as he would. “Mary Lee has just had her first book accepted this morning.”

“Oh really,” voice of ice, “what publisher?”

“Yours.” I got my small revenge, fifty years younger than he was, full of martinis, and robbed of Festing Jones.

Hyde Park is just across Park Lane from the Dorchester. I didn’t leave. I escaped. All the rest of the daylight I wandered in the park. It was damp, and a mist was in the distance and it smelled of autumn, which is different from our fall—a lying down, no dry wind, no deep frost, damp and dying. I thought of what I had seen and heard of fame, and of that man, who had had so many honors, so much money, and all the public praise that a long career could give him, and who still stammered like a neglected small boy when he was faced with any competition. I saw the face, not as vicious, but as etched with years of pain and bitterness.

“If that is fame I don’t ever want it,” I told the trees and the martinis and the afternoon.

I knew I couldn’t help being an alchemist, transmuting the raw material of life into fiction. It was and is for me a function as obsessive as an oyster making a pearl, an activity that can only be understood by experiencing it, one not to be analyzed by outside observers. But there were things I could help. I could help letting reputation shadow my soul, as Maugham had done; and at the same time, I remembered the kind, gentle man hidden within him that I had seen a few weeks before. I could help being etched as he was by acceptance or denial. I saw that it was not fame itself, but the seeking of fame that could destroy.

I even considered not publishing at all if that was its end. But I rejected that. Not even the martinis or the experience or the cold that was creeping over the park and making me shiver could make that seem anything but self-defeating. We do, as Emily Dickinson said, write our letters to the world, and we want the world to read them.

I had a son to raise, and what money I could glean from the small advances I was condemned to for so long was needed. All this in an afternoon in the park, drunken resolution and paraphrase, swearing on the altar of God eternal vigilance against any form of literary tyranny over my mind.

I vowed to find my energy within and not from reputation, and to avoid the “literary” life. I resolved to be grateful for understanding and praise and honors if they came but never to hang on them, and after finishing the books I would write—how many then I had no idea of—to forget publishing as soon as I could and get back to work.

Now, over thirty years later, and to my shame, a single adverse and smart-aleck review of my book, Celebration, by a “remote and ineffectual don” at Oxford, has triggered this recall to warn me once again that I, too, can fall victim to that most familiar of industrial hazards as a writer—literary paranoia. Never mind that the other reviews have been more than favorable. This one thorn sticks, and I must face some regrettable facts before I can pull it out.

Since that fall day in London I have faced the public a dozen times with a book in my hand, as did Rousseau—a gift that I see being thrown over the heads of the reviewers to the people who want to read it, like contraceptives in Dublin airport. Financially, I must stand or fall in the literary industry of New York, as specialized and distilled a center as the diamond and gold merchants who flock together on Forty-seventh Street.

Have I kept the resolutions I made that day? Like New Year’s resolutions—only haltingly. Neither the experience I had then, nor any since, has fully armed me for the diminishing act of having to make public a book on which I have spent several private years. Nothing in my necessarily isolated way of living prepares me for the sea change that goes on for a few months, in which I become public, a target and an object, whether I am praised or blamed. The very qualities that make me and most writers what we are also ill fit us for what we have to do.

What I did not know then was that it is the exposure that palls; intelligent praise mitigates it—a godsend, a palliative. We must go through publishing, alas, when we are most vulnerable, bankrupt with fatigue, when we have spent energy deep into our élan vital to finish books. Fortunately it only happens once every two or three years. I don’t think most of us could stand it oftener. It is more primitive and more frightening than facing the reviewers. But anxiety and fatigue can charge reviewing with more importance than it ought to possess.

I cannot deny that I have gone through all the crises of having to publish, and have been hurt, though never stopped by them. I have had to remind myself over and over that the impetus is outside and predictable: a few real lovers of good writing who read before they judge; a few fine writers who are occasional critics; good luck or bad luck; bad editorial choice of reviewers; professional reviewers with graduate student mentalities who make their livings by “approving of what is approved of” or by grinding abstract axes in public. I have felt their tiny pitons as they climb my back toward their careers. When this happens to me I am tempted by the dying words of Comte, “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.”

I have hated as much as anyone else being a victim of careless reviewers from the burgeoning academic industry. They remind me of the portrait in Huckleberry Finn of the girl who “had two arms folded across her breast, and two arms stretched out in front, and two more reaching up toward the moon.” One academic eye is on the book as raw material for acceptable theory. (When I am charged with those twin illusions of MFA programs, point of view and characterization, I feel like I have submitted my book to a “creative writing” workshop in hell.)

Then there is another eye on this year’s critical fashion, another eye on The Department, and yet another eye on the Sunday Book Sections or weeklies I call The Literary Reviews of Tenure. Alas, having regular jobs and having to publish or perish, they work cheap, and budget-obsessed editors do no honor to writing by overhiring them. By the rules of politeness in publishing, we novelists are supposed to allow ourselves to be used to help others keep their jobs, to be derided, misunderstood, and compared to death without a word of protest.

No writer I know who has achieved a reputation after years of work has escaped having it thrown back in his or her face. I am reminded of the young, poor poets trashing T. S. Eliot in London pubs in the early fifties, or young would-be novelists decrying the reputation of Graham Greene, Henry Green, Somerset Maugham, Angus Wilson, or any other famous writer who had succeeded after long years in that most unforgivable of activities—earning money and critical acceptance.

Alas, I too have been “listed”—that lazy critical habit of making categories instead of reading. There are lists of Southern writers, Jewish writers, Suburban writers, Postmodernists, Minimalists, Maximalists, Premenstrualists, the Sensitive, the Important, and what a friend calls the I’m So Fucking Lonely School of American writing. Finally there are THE GREAT, the list of those who have outlasted their contemporaries, where it helps to be unread, old, male, grouchy, foreign, Eudora Welty, or dead. In the end I say, like the boy in Zéro de Conduite, “Monsieur le Professeur, je vous dit merde.”

In those few months of public life, we tend to protect ourselves with false nostalgia. Once there were better reviewers. Once there was grace and honor in publishing. This is nonsense. There never was. The marketplace does not change, and Herman Melville still stands awkwardly at literary teas, ignored by Margaret Fuller.

All we ever have had to defend us is time. Time will give the destructive, ambitious critic a footnote, as it did to Lockhart, who was once the feared editor of the Edinburgh Review. Now he is mentioned, if at all, because of his advice to the little chemist to go back to his pots—this to John Keats—and his devastating review of Wuthering Heights. He has become a bad joke, a parody, a reductio ad absurdum of all critics.

Melville died forgotten. Conrad’s honors came too late. Faulkner had already been too wounded when long-earned recognition came. When Scott Fitzgerald died, just forty-four years old, people thought he had been dead for years. Poor Stendhal and Melville, dead, provide jobs for academics who act as hatchet men on the living. Few of those we revere now escaped the exhaustion of neglect and denial. I will not be fooled like this. Ataturk once said that there was no such thing as a victim; there were only people who allowed themselves to be victimized.

So, at the age of sixty-eight, I have made myself encounter not only Somerset Maugham and Angus Wilson that day in London thirty-four years ago, but the young writer that I was then, so sure that I would not fall victim to my own weaknesses. The recall of those resolves sustains me, though, and replaces despond with anger if not forgiveness. Better to be sustained by arrogance and curse the night than to yield to mournful self-defense or the bitterness that etched the face of Somerset Maugham.

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