More than fifty years ago, the racing driver Mike Hawthorn used to write (or have written for him) a weekly column in Beaverbrook’sSunday Express. In one multiple choice quiz, he asked what was most dangerous: bald tyres, lack of a rear-view mirror, defective brake lights or exceeding the speed limit. The value of seat belts did not arise; no one had yet invented them. If they had been available, Hawthorn might not have died in his Jaguar, in 1959, while exceeding the speed limit, on the wet Guildford by-pass. As it was, he declared that lack of a rear-view mirror was more dangerous than anything else on the list.
Looking Back was the title of a memoir written by Somerset Maugham in the late evening of his ninety-one years. It wasgenerally assumed that Max Beaverbrook, had put him up to it, since the book was serialised in theSunday Express. It included what seemed outspokenly sour memories of Maugham’s wife, Syrie. They sold copies at the time, but would be mild today. Syrie’s sad fault was that she went on loving Willie when he could no longer stand the sight of her. As a result, she ‘made me scenes’, not what a writer needs when he is trying to make his own. In fact, the main reason for Maugham’s aversion was that she belonged to the wrong sex.
His reputation for man-of-the-worldliness was dented by the spleen which he unleashed inLooking Back, but a succession of biographies, the most recent by Selena Hastings, proves that ‘the Old Party’ – a title he assumed when hardly more than sixty years old – has retained his interest for the public. Whether or not, as Hastings advertised, his sins were scarlet, his books continue to be read, although rarely ‘taught’. Maugham’s connection with the theatre (and later the cinema), and Virginia Woolf’s sneer, echoed by Frieda Lawrence, that he ‘wrote for money’, have put him into the category of writers who excite both envy, for their success, and scorn, because they are assumed to have pandered to vulgar appetites in order to gain it.
In the first volume ofPersonal Terms, I noted how I went to see Willie, as insiders called him and I never did, in the autumn of 1954. I knew little of his personal life and cared less.Of Human Bondage had incited me to write fiction. I had been working on my own first novel, about the rise of a proto rock star, in a small hotel bedroom in Juan-les-Pins, on the day that I took the bus to St Jean Cap Ferrat in order to have tea with him at the Villa Mauresque.
I still envy the facility with which, when young, some people gain access to impressive company. Biographies frequently tell us how, within a few days of arriving in a strange city, their subjects have met the reigning artists or intellectuals. I lack the nerve to rap on the doors of people who regularly appear in indexes, even though I might have learnt, from Maugham’s amiable response to my letter out of the blue, that the famous can often be as lonely or curious as t
