The Far Side of Paradise
JABLONS, PAMELA
The Far Side of Paradise Conversations with Willie: Recollections of William Somerset Maugham By Robin Maugham Simon and Schuster. 188pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Pamela Jablons Contributor,...
...You don't love me," he replied, "because you've never known me...
...Women turn up occasionally, but for the most part the book is a chatty chronicle of a select, largely homosexual men's club...
...I think what he craved most in the world was happiness...
...We see the aged writer, quite literally, after hours, never when he is discussing his craft or the ideas and characters of his many works...
...Actually, a great deal of his work survives —especially the short stories—but it embodies a very narrow, albeit beautifully articulated, perspective...
...He went on to relate that Syrie told him she did not think she would live much longer, and that she loved him...
...Financially, Maugham was an extremely successful writer...
...Don't put your head in a noose, even though it may gain you a tawdry success with some of your friends...
...Because we know it would outrage them...
...Why do you think that Noel or I have never stuck our personal predilections down our public's throats...
...Syrie then asked, "Like a farewell between two distant acquaintances...
...the "I" is his nephew Robin, Lord Maugham, the author and narrator of these "recollections...
...His novels, short stories and plays (and the films derived from them) made him a multimillionaire...
...It is hard to feel sympathy for the cantankerous, overbearing, often depressed individual revealed in these pages with admirable honesty...
...How this tension contributed to the conflict with his wife, Syrie, is apparent from an apology he gave to friends upon arriving late for a dinner engagement one evening: "As I was crossing the hotel lobby, I was stopped by a woman and do you know, for some reason that now escapes me, she was once my wife...
...At one point he blames all his "troubles" on the fact that he was a "quarter normal and three-quarters queer," but tried to believe it was the other way around...
...Drawing directly from diaries of visits with his famous uncle, Lord Maugham gives us some highly evocative vignettes: Willie's description of meeting the Queen of Spain...
...It is his quality of malignancy that pierces me with fear...
...Yet his villa, his Rolls Royce, his cook Annette ("the envy of all the other millionaires on the Riviera"), and his adoring public (to the end he received over 300 letters a day) were not enough...
...of his family...
...The "he" is William Somerset Maugham, who at the time of that description was 90 years old and given to fits of senility...
...We learn, too, of the stays by such guests as H. G. Wells, Noel Coward, Harold Nicholson, Michael Ar-len, and assorted royal personages at his magnificent Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat...
...Unlike his nephew, who lived openly on a "little yacht" with various young "boys," the elder Maugham could not integrate his life and his literary persona...
...Despite his proclaiming himself to be a "sentimental old party," he was, in fact, an embittered man...
...Do you know," Willie remarks at one point, "sometimes when I look at my stories, I can't imagine how they came to be written...
...Do you seriously imagine," he reproached his nephew after reading a draft of the latter's book, "that apart from a handful of queers, the public are going to be interested in the goings-on of a few pederasts in Tangier...
...In a sense, Maugham diagnosed his own shortcomings very perceptively when he told his nephew: "All over the world there are wonderful stories to be written, if only you've got the balls to write them...
...According to his nephew and those whom he quotes in the book, what Maugham worried about most—his popularity in his lifetime and his monetary success notwithstanding—was the longevity of his writings (which he estimated himself as "somewhere near the top of the second league...
...Reviewed by Pamela Jablons Contributor, "Columbia Journalism Review," "Artnews" "He is, I am convinced, a maniac...
...of life with Gerald Haxton, his lover...
...As one of his guests puts it: "Perhaps .. . what Willie wanted most in the world was something far simpler than riches and success—though they were tremendously important to him...
...Do you want our farewell to be like this...
...Indeed, except for rare flashes of similarity exhibited while telling anecdotes at meals, Willie the man and W. Somerset Maugham the author were very different individuals...
...Maugham was nevertheless obsessed with his own homosexuality...
...And he answered slowly: "I wonder if we were ever anything more...
Vol. 61 • September 1978 • No. 19
