W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM AND THE QUEST FOR FREEDOM by ROBERT LORIN CALDER 324 pages. Doubleday. $8.95.
Robert Lorin Calder, an English teacher at the University of Saskatchewan, has written the kind of academic dissertation that is doomed to sit on the shelf as if in a jar, pickled. But the book’s appendices, not just one but two, are inflamed with gossipy life.
The body of the book pursues —through every novel, play and story, good, bad or silly, that Maugham ever wrote — Calder’s all-purpose insight that Maugham was preoccupied with the escape from bondage. Calder has dis covered, for example, that “examined in their entirety, Maugham’s works contain over 300 images concerned with liberty or enslavement.”
But despite Calder’s thick spectacles and some earnest overpraise, he under stands that Maugham did create several stories that are still read and several characters who are fondly remembered. Most memorable by far is Rosie, she of the pale gold hair, white breasts and happy promiscuity, whose enchanting smile suffuses Maugham’s celebrated roman à clef, Cakes and Ale.
Calder’s Appendix A is entitled “Rosie,” and it identifies for the first time the original of the heroine. Maugham always built his most interesting characters on real people. The publication of Cakes and Ale in 1933 touched off not one but a series of literary scandals, starting with the charge that Rosie’s writer husband was a caricature of Thomas Hardy. A convincing original for Rosie herself has never been proposed, though it has been argued—once to Maugham’s face—that Rosie had to be the one total fiction in the book because the author’s homosexuality precluded his ever having loved a woman.
Maugham was furious at the suggestion. Now Calder advances proof —direct testimony supported by persuasive circumstance—that Rosie was based on a woman named Ethelwyn Sylvia Jones. As Calder reconstructs it, she was the second daughter of a minor playwright, herself an actress, beautiful, intelligent, full-blown, artlessly warmhearted. Maugham met her in 1904. Their affair lasted until 1913.
That autumn in Chicago, where she was performing in a play, he proposed to her. She turned him down. Years later, apparently, she told him that when she rejected him she had just learned she was pregnant by another man. “I often wonder,” Maugham is reported to have told a friend, “what course my life would have taken had it not been for that… freakish circumstance.”
Calder’s Appendix B raises a different ghost, the one that gives life to another of Maugham’s books that is still read, Ashenden, or: the British Agent.
During World War I Maugham was a secret agent. In 1917, it is generally known, he was sent to Russia to help the Kerensky government against the Bolsheviks. Years later, in his autobiography, Maugham asserted that if he had only arrived earlier, Kerensky’s fall might have been prevented.
Improbable as that claim still appears, the remarkable extent of Maugham’s mission is now suggested for the first time by a series of docu ments that Calder found in the private papers of Sir William Wiseman, the man who sent Maugham to Russia and acted as his control. “It is clear,” Calder asserts, that Maugham “was in fact Wiseman’s chief agent in Russia be tween July and November of 1917.”
Calder then reprints memorandums, cables, quickly jotted notes, a list of code names and passwords, a receipt for $21,000 signed by Maugham— with all the academic ceremony of a man emp tying his pockets of a day’s accumulated stubs and scraps.
Oddly, even endearingly, Scholar Calder does not seem to know what to do with a real discovery when he has made it.
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