W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

Don Fernando

collected edition, 1950

AS A BOY, I was under the impression that Maugham was the greatest living writer, and if not the greatest, surely the most famous. An appreciative public fostered an image of him as the ultimate cosmopolitan, living the stories he was writing up. Somehow he’d been caught up in the Russian Revolution, and that was glamorous. Somehow he’d collected the best modern art and quarreled over ownership with his daughter, an only child, and that was sensational. Besides, members of my family basked in the reflected glory of knowing him. Known either as Mitzi or Mary, to Maugham she was uniquely Maria. I found a letter he’d written from the Hotel Vendôme in Paris that shows how he could trifle with her. “Dear sweet good and kind Maria, You asked me what I wanted for a birthday present and I told you a handkerchief and you have given me a number. I shall think of you every time I put one in my pocket and how can one think of you without loving you?”

Early in his own literary career, my father had got to know him and in 1953 took me to stay with Maugham at Cap Ferrat in the South of France. I was impressed. You went into what appeared an endless vista of black and white flags on the floor. Then there was a very large drawing room. Martinis were mixed at half past twelve; there were two or three before lunch and the same again at six o’clock. I was very conscious of the Master upstairs in his study, at work. He would come down for a walk and this would be the central part of the day. I was taken around the garden by him, very slowly, with Alan Searle, who’d been his secretary before becoming his partner. Maugham was particularly friendly to me and anxious to know if I’d read his books and what the young thought of them. The movements of his mouth as he overcame his stammering gave him the look of a Galapagos tortoise. It was night and I was in my room about to go to sleep when he came in and sat on the bed. I was slightly apprehensive, but all he did was to give me this copy of Don Fernando carefully inscribed, “For David, when he goes to Spain from his ancient friend W. Somerset Maugham.”