Now I know why Somerset Maugham had such a bad reputation - rather unfairly, in my view

I heard the final part of the adaptation of Selina Hastings’ biography of Somerset Maugham on Radio 4, and the rancour against him, which I picked up on as a child and which has, apparently, been history’s verdict of the man, is explained.

Once Gerald Haxton died (of alcoholism), Maugham turned to Alan Searle for companionship, and it seems it was Searle who caused all the trouble which led to Maugham’s rift with his daughter Liza and, indirectly, to being ostracised by the English establishment and a very, very unhappy old age. He met Searle, who was more or less simply an upmarket rent boy, in the late Twenties and moved him into the Villa Mauresque after Haxton died, where Searle took over Haxton’s role and acted as companion, secretary and housekeeper. He was said to have none of Haxton’s charm,

sophistication, elegance, wit or presence. He is described at one point as wandering around the villa in garish shirts, ‘his fat thighs bulging out of too small white shorts’, and being so specific, I would hope Hastings will have referenced the quote. According to Hastings (I should point out that what I write here is merely what I heard on Radio 4), by the Sixties, when Maugham had become a very old man, Searle began to worry that he might be left destitute and started whispering in Maugham’s ear that he might not necessarily have been Liza’s father as his wife Syrie had had plenty of lovers at the time (and was, in newspaper parlance ‘a bit of a goer’. Lord how we guys dream of meeting one of those. Is it ineffably crass to say so?) Maugham was then persuaded to write a further volume of autobiography, which was serialised in the Sunday Express (a paper which is more or less the quintessence of middlebrow) and in which he wrote about his marriage in very unflattering terms. This did not go down well, and even old friends turned against him. Hastings points out, by the way, that Maugham was very old, and more or less senile when he did this.

An especially sad incident came when on his annual visit to London, he went to the Garrick Club as usual, but when he entered the first-floor bar, it fell silent and then one or two members ostentatiously walked out. (I would very much like to bet that the behaviour and moral worth of those who walked out would not have survived much close scrutiny, such is the hypocrisy of all too many of those who pass judgment.) Maugham was distraught. Back at the Villa Mauresque he would have bouts of uncontrollable weeping and outbursts of fury. And that little shit Alan Searle began writing to friends and Maugham’s nephew how impossible Maugham had become, although I should add that in later life he was full of remorse at his shit-stirring. So Maugham died an unhappy man.

The readings from Hastings book included recordings of Maugham himself, and he comes across as rather modest and self-effacing and with a generosity of spirit which is wholly lacking in many other self-regarding 'artists'. I’m sure that, like all of us, he had his faults, but his memory does seem to have been very harshly treated. It is so typical of life that, whenever possible, we prefer to take a narrow and vindictive view, and our judgments ignore almost everything which went before if we are given even half the chance to portray someone in a murky light. It is ironic that Maugham himself once observed: 'We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.' We should try to see the whole man. Let’s hope the future will value his work and the man a little more.

As I am something of a sentimental old softie, the pictures of Maugham I have chosen to illustrate this entry are neither of those with which we are probably all familiar, Maugham the sour-faced old queen who seems to be sneering at the world, but one from when he was much younger, when he was a charming, good-looking guest at parties in fashionable London and when all the ladies (and, of course, men) fancied the pants off him. It is very odd that those pictures of him in his last years portray a man who is totally at odds with earlier impressions.

Barry, who reads this blog, pointed out that Maugham did himself no favours by writing and somewhat sending up London society. It seems that London society bided its time and took its revenge when it finally got the chance to do so. What I find so admirable about Maugham - I have already said this, but I shall repeat it because it is worth repeating - was his sheer professionalism, that come what may and even on his very bad days, he sat down every morning to write. And he did so even knowing that what he was writing on that particular day was, perhaps, not even very good and would not be used. I do so like that attitude. Shame I don't have it, or better, don't yet have it, because I do know from experience that I can have it.

Incidentally, Liza inherited the Villa Mauresque, but Searle was not left destitute. He died a very wealthy man, thanks to Maugham's generosity. The excerpt I heard did not say so, but Maugham legally adopted him as his son.

NB. Pedant's Corner: there are two accepted spellings of 'judgment'. I choose 'judgment' rather than 'judgement' only because it is Daily Mail house style and the one I am accustomed to using at work, and thus also when not at work.

My front tooth - note, tooth, not teeth. A lesson for us all who are flirting with late middle-age

And now for something completely different, not to say veering on the banal.
When I first went to work at the Daily Mail on the features subs desk, the deputy chief sub was a nice chap called Robin Popham. I had just turned 40, and he was two or three years older. That was 19 years ago, and Robin retired when he turned 60 in 2008. They retire them at 60 on the Mail and furthermore until very recently, the paper operated a final salary pension scheme - or whatever its technical name is and still does for long-term employees - so pensions were always rather generous for anyone, such as Robin, who, crucially, had joined before around 1990, when salaries also got a percentage increase. (Three per cent of £20,000 is a lot less than 3 per cent of £60,000, and by 1990 Robin and several others would already have been on a generous whack after the profligate Eighties. But this has absolutely nothing to do with what I mean tell you.)
A year of two before he retired, I noticed that one of Robin’s front teeth was rather larger than the other. I wondered why, in the nigh on 20 years I had known him and always almost sat next to, I’d never noticed this before. It was quite noticeable that it was bigger than its pal. Then, a few months ago, I noticed that one of my front to teeth was larger and more prominent than the other. What was going on? So at my six-monthly check-up by my dentist, I pointed this out and asked him what was going one. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that happens a lot when we get older.’ Oh, really. They didn’t tell us that in reform school.
So now be off, all of you, and check the size of your front teeth.

Somerset Maugham and a warning that first impression might well not be all the are cracked up to be

Radio 4’s Book Of The Week this week is The Secret Lives Of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings. I’ve so far only read a few of Maugham’s short stories, although a few months ago I bought and briefly started The Painted Veil, mainly, I think, because it had just been made into a film, and although I didn’t at the time carry on with it, I shall finish it.

I have seen none of his plays, and I don’t think they are even performed anymore. I have seen one of the films based on his short story The Letter, which I enjoyed immensely. But did not know a lot of Maugham, except - and this knowledge was based purely on the scraps of hearsay which come our way - that he was ‘queer’ and ‘not very nice’ and that he died an embittered man. Then there are the pictures of him as an old man, his lined face apparently conveying a distain for more or less everything.

I also knew that he held a somewhat odd position in the literary world in that, born in the 19th century and living to a ripe old age, he straddled two worlds. In his work he also held a somewhat odd position. He said of himself that he was in the first rank of second-raters, which I think is Maugham being rather harsh on himself. He became very wealthy, but as far as I can see deservedly so. He was immensely disciplined, and according to Hastings’ biography, when he had finally settled into the Villa Mauresque in (on?) Cap Ferrat, every day - including Sundays and birthdays - he rose, had breakfast and then wrote from eight until noon. He also wrote everything in longhand and given his rather large body of work, I find that sheer professionalism wholly admirable.

Overall, I am now rather puzzled by the somewhat disparaging impression I have of Maugham, one which I more or less adopted wholesale merely because it was the one everyone seems to have had. I think the world, or rather the British world, decided that despite his talent, output, work and wealth, Maugham was, at heart, a wrong ’un for a few essentially trivial reasons.

First, however broadminded we Brits like to think we are, we get rather sniffy when someone of Maugham’s fame and stature decides he would prefer to settle abroad. Abroad, for Brits is for visiting and sneering at. (Anyone who has visited one of the very many Mediterranean resorts popular with Brits and sees how whole communities have been transformed into tacky outposts of little Britain will know that the Brits are only prepared to accept ‘abroad’ on their own terms. Cala Llonga was a case in point.) But Maugham, who loved travelling and went all over the world, decided he wanted to make his home in the South of France.

Then there was the fact the Maugham was ‘queer’. In recent years, Britain has finally grown up on the matter of homosexuality and now longer persecutes those of its kind who are born homosexual. In fact, if anything we have swung to the opposite extreme and are now expected to celebrate gayness in all its myriad manifestations. But that acceptance - describing it as a ‘tolerance’ of homosexuality, as some still do, is horribly patronising, although the attitude conveyed by the use of the word ‘tolerance’ still prevails - is a very recent development, and although every adult knew of ‘queer’ friends, acquaintances and relatives, they were, in the great and dishonorable tradition of British hypocrisy regarded as outcasts. So the impression I inherited was that Maugham, not to put too fine a point on it, was something of a monster.

One thing he did was, it has to be said, rather vindictive: his daughter Liza sued him after he sold a collection of paintings, some of which were meant to be passed on to her when he died. She won her suit and an angry Maugham then declared publicly that he was not her biological father and disinherited her. It might well be true that he was not her father as her mother, Syrie Wellcome, the former wife of the chap who founded the pharmaceutical firm, put it about rather a lot, but if he wasn’t he had never mentioned it before.

He had eventually married Syrie after she became pregnant with Liza, and if he was not the father, or even suspected he was not the father, he would hardly have done that. His angry response was not nice, but on the other hand if those of us who had acted in ways in similarly bad ways in the course of our lives were obliged to leave the room, the room would soon be empty.

I started listening to Radio 4’s readings from Hastings’ biography on Monday, and managed to capture all so far. And the picture of Maugham that emerged is of a far more pleasant character. He had an unhappy childhood and developed a stammer. Once he had qualified as a doctor, he was said to have had rather a gentle bedside manner and took and interest in all his patients, especially the dirt-poor ones from Lambeth. When war broke out he was a highly celebrated and wealthy popular playwright whose worked was being staged on both sides of the Atlantic, yet he voluntarily served with the ambulance brigade, putting his medical training to good use. (He has ceased working as a doctor years earlier.

Later, after that service was curtailed by ill-health, and after he had recuperated, he again served his country, this time working for the secret service in Geneva and later in Russia. He was said to be charming company, was very good-looking and was socially popular. He is said by Hastings to have been very good with children. His candid self-appraisal as a first-rate second-rater speaks of a modesty and honesty which I like to feel is wholly in keeping with his disciplined professionalism. He was no glutton, but kept himself trim by swimming, playing tennis, walking and playing golf. He seems rather to have been put upon by the two major lovers he had, Gerald Haxton and Alan Searle, but he bore it stoically.

Now, I know that all this doesn’t necessarily add up to a row of beans as far as a man’s moral worth is concerned, but it is all rather at odds with the conventional picture I somehow acquired of Maugham the Monster and what Hastings writes in something of a revelation. The picture I now get of Maugham is of a man I should liked to have met and whose company I think I might have enjoyed and respected. If I didn’t have enough books already which are waiting to be read, not least Maugham’s own The Painted Veil, I would buy Hastings’ biography. She wrote a very good one of Evelyn Waugh.

Jesus The Terrorist: a book knocking around the office which has caught my eye and which I shall read. Might well be bollocks . . .

Here at I work last night, I came across a book provocatively entitled Jesus The Terrorist, and after spending a few minutes reading the blurb on the back and part of the introduction, I decided to take it home. (This is not theft by the way as, by general consent, most items one comes across in a newspaper office, especially books and magazines, are common property, by which hacks mean that if you can get away with stealing it without anyone noticing, it's yours. Obviously we draw the line at those items which are personal - wallets, coats, cars, that kind of thing. I should also point out that newspapers are inundated with unsolicited new books, sent in by publishers who know nothing of the industry and feel we might be able to give them a little free publicity. They say you are never more than a few feet away from a rat. Well, where I sit on the feature subs desk, I am never more than a few feet away from a whole pile of books - at least 30 - which have been sent in on spec in the hope that we will take an interest in them and write glowing reviews. They are always ignored, clutter up the place for several years and then, I think, are recycled into a constitutent of tarmacadam. And if they are not, they should be. The books department has even more books, and every so often several hundreds of these are piled several feet high on a desk and everyone is invited to take what they want. I invariably take several and never read any of them. These have included a biography of Hogarth, a biography of Jung and other hi'falutin nonsense in which I am theoretically interested but obviously not interested enough actually to read the books.)
My first reaction when I saw the title Jesus The Terrorist - and I should point out that even though I have read a little more, the jury is still out and shall be for quite some time - was that this was the kind of crap Erich von Daniken used to churn out - Was God An Astronaut? - and latterly a certain Graham Hancock, whose books have often been serialised by the Daily Mail and who is always introduced as once having been on staff at The Economist. (The subtext is that The Economist is a journal of such seriousness that it is incapable of employing anyone who might be a sandwich short of a picnic. And with an eye on the libel lawyers - who these days are everywhere - I must hastily point out that I am not claiming Hancock is in any way mad or a charlatan, just that unfortunately he often gives the impression that the lift doesn't always reach the top floor. Here is his website.)
To digress rapidly back to my theme - a digression from a digression, now that, surely, is true sophistication - the book I - er - filched is not badly written. The author, a Peter Cresswell, who has previously written Censored Messiah (which, on googling, seems to cover more or less the same ground) has a Cambridge degree (but see my caveat about assuming The Economist would never employ a nutter) and a Phd in social anthropology from the University of Wincanton - oh, all right then, York - so just because he can write an English sentence without dropping his 'aitches and avoiding glottal stops doesn't necessarily mean his books are of any worth. But nor should they prima facie be discarded.
His thesis is that far from being a religious leader who was intent on founding a new church, Jesus - apparently the name is a Westernisation of a garbled Greek translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic Yeshua and until 600 years ago was pronounced Iesu here in the West - was one of quite a few Jews rattling around that neck of the woods who actively tried to rid Palestine, Judea and Galilli of the Roman occupation, that his apostles were all more or less part of his extended family (the claim that he had several brothers and sisters has longed been made, although not by the Vatican, and strikes me as eminently reasonable), and that accounts of his life were later wilfully distorted by members of the emerging 'Christian' church in order to fit in with Jewish prophecies.
Now however good, bad or indifferent this book turns out to be, it is an area I find interesting. A few years ago, I read A J Wilson's Jesus, A Biography, and this book seems to cover much the same ground. Both seem to agree that Saul turned Paul was the genius behind the founding of the 'Christian faith', and that as far as the religious sphere was concerned, Jesus had no intention of founding a new Church but was an orthodox Jew who wanted to purify Judaism and return to a simpler way of worship. For example, it seems James, now accepted as his brother, took over the leadership of the small group who followed his teachings after Jesus's death (although Christians will insist that Jesus didn't die) wanted to keep the group as a small Jewish sect and that he came into conflict with Paul who had far, far grander intentions - as we now know.
Wilson's book admirably - in my view - adopts the principle of Occam's razor and when in doubt, his explanations tend to the prosaic rather than the miraculous. I'm rather hoping that when writing Jesus The Terrorist Cresswell has adopted the same principle.
Cresswell does concede that the title of his book is provocative, but he claims this is necessary. He also writes that because of the murky nature of his subject matter and because books are linear (he doesn't say that, I do), he is obliged to present some aspects of what he has to say without at first justifying his claims, but promises later to supply explanations and justifications. Whether or not he does so is the acid test as to whether this is a serious book or just more cack along the lines of von Daniken's drivel. I shall keep you posted. And if I never mention it again, you will know this book went the way of Jenny Uglow's biography of Hogarth.
Incidentally, Cresswell's book will be published by an outfit called O Books which 'operates virtually' and has now office. However, the main man is based in Hampshire.
From the O Books website:

This is the shocking truth:
* Jesus was a zealot who wanted to be King of Israel.
* The apostles and disciples were members of his family, by blood and by marriage, and they went on to wage a war against Rome.
* Far from 'converting', Saul - the false apostle - remained malicious and vindictive to the end.
* Saul started the lie that 'the Jews' killed Jesus, while he himself helped to kill Jesus' brother James.
* Saul invented Christianity, borrowing the rituals of a pagan religion, Mithraism.
* The gospels are a deliberately scrambled version of Jewish zealot propaganda with characters, who were Jewish warriors, stolen and subverted by Christian writers.
AUTHOR: Peter Cresswell graduated as a social anthropologist from Cambridge University and did a post graduate degree in sociology at York. He trained as a sub-editor and worked as a research officer at the Open University. After working as a senior journalist and leader writer, he set up a publicity consultancy. He is the author of Censored Messiah (O Books 1974) which shed new light on the origins of Christianity.

O Books seems to be a busy outfit and has a loads of books on its website. I can't as yet not be sure that is isn't a vanity publisher, although given the number of links it has with distributors worldwide that might be unlikely. Cresswell's new book isn't being published until 2010, so I suppose my copy is technically illegal.

The Vatican's smart footwork on the question of disaffected Anglicans who will be offered their own little room in the great RC mansion and, at a stroke, will increase the number of Catholics in Britain while - at a stroke - heaping even more woe on St Rowan Williams deserves mention, but must have its own entry. Kate will not be in the slightest interested, but I suspect Barry will have a few things to pass comment. Also when pontificating about the issue (which is not such a bad joke in context), I shall merely be regurgitating comments by others I have half understood, so don't hold your breath.

My cars: a short guide. Part V - My Triumph Toledo and another sad end

After the undignified end suffered by my Datsun and I had sold it to my dope dealer (which sounds a lot more louche than was the reality), I needed another car and agreed to buy my flatmate Wayne's Triumph Toledo. Wayne Francis was a reporter on the Evening Mail where I worked as a sub, and Wayne liked a pint or two, then three or four, then five or six. The night Wayne didn't arrive home three sheets to the wind was the day of the Second Coming.

Wayne was from Bristol and had a broad Bristol accent. In many ways he fitted the clichéd view of reporters (as I did when I was still working as one, except for the heavy drinking. One girlfriend I had was warned by a doctor in the hospital in which she worked that reporters were like sailors - they had a girl in every port. She was living in South Wales and I was living in Newcastle at the time, and when she told me what the doctor had told her, I pooh-poohed it and swore my undying love. Unfortunately, I WAS running two more girls at the time, one of whom even had the same name as she did, she made it difficult when one of them rang and I was told: "Patrick, Amanda on the phone for you."), but he was a good reporter and eventually became the Sun's royal correspondent.

I met him again years later when he got sick of following assorted royals around the world and joined the Mail instead. He told me that the Palace operated a system of apartheid among the various royal correspondents and distinguished them between 'one of us' like, for example, the Mail's Richard Kay, and 'not one of us' like, for example gobby, hard-drinking Wayne from Bristol. But it didn't bother him one jot.
I can't remember why he was selling his Toledo (his was dark blue, not brown like the one pictured), but I was interested in buying it. I no longer needed a car in order to bump my income be fiddling expenses, because as a sub-editor I didn't get expenses, but I still needed a car to get around. It, too, provided good service for several years, although, if I remember correctly, the radio went on the blink, and there was some special kind of fiddling around with it to get it to work.

The end came for the Toledo quite quickly and in an unexpected way. By then I was working for Power News, the CEGB staff newspaper, and was once again creaming the moolah in buckshee total bullshit mileage expenses even though I was still a sub. (If you remember, we used to organise long and completed pointless trips simply to claim mileage, the odd thing being that everyone from the editor up knew what was going on.)

First the chassis 'broke'. I use inverted commas because I am not to sure chassis can 'break' but this one did and the engine sank by what must have been a foot or two. Now, I would simply get rid of a car like that an accept the financial hit, but then, I was rather more stupid and got a garage to repair it. This they did. A week later, I was returning from the printers in Bicester and was just north of Stratford when a car suddenly drove onto the main road and I went straight into it.

My car was a write-off, and I was lucky to survive, especially as my seatbelt was broken and I was, to all intents and purposes, not wearing one. And that was the end of the Toledo, just a week after spending £400 (in 1983, now, in 2013, anything between £1,1018 and £1,963 according to a very useful website called What's It Worth which you can find here for working out today's prices in pounds and here for doing the same in dollars) on having the bloody thing repaired. Next came my massive Vauxhall Victor, which was built and, unfortunately, also drove like a tank.