The 1937 Club: Theatre / Somerset Maugham

Strap yourselves in, we’re off to 1937. Thanks as on previous occasions to Simon and Kaggsy for setting all this up.

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Tom meant nothing to Julia any more, but she had a score to settle with Avice and she wasn’t going to forget it. The slut!

It’s Somerset Maugham! Wouldn’t it be nice if a major revival of middlebrow writers like Maugham and Arnold Bennett could be effected at some point this century, but I don’t suppose it’ll happen. Their best work is still in print, but they suffer from being almost too accessible. Most of the popular fiction of any era is doomed to go out of fashion, and Maugham’s Theatre is an exemplar of the popular novel, a proper page-turner.

(To be clear, I don’t intend any slight by my use of the word popular: Maugham’s a class act. The edition I read contained a preface from 1939 reflecting on, among other things, the novel’s errors. Forgive me for quoting it at length, but it’s worth it just for a taste of Maugham’s elegance, self-effacement and humour:

The novelist tries to be accurate in every detail, but sometimes he makes a mistake, and there is generally no lack of persons who are prepared to point it out to him. Once I wrote a novel in which I had occasion to mention a beach called Manly, which is a favourite resort during the bathing season of the inhabitants of Sydney, and unfortunately I spelt it Manley. The superfluous ‘e’ brought me hundreds of angry and derisive letters from New South Wales. You would have thought that the slip, which might after all have been a printer’s error, though of course it was due only to my own carelessness, was a deliberate insult that I had offered to the Commonwealth. Indeed one lady told me that it was one more proof of the ignorant superciliousness of the English towards the inhabitants of the English colonies, and that it was people like me who would be responsible if next time Great Britain was embroiled in a Continental war the youth of Australia, instead of flying to her rescue, preferred to stay quietly at home. She ended her letter on a rhetorical note. What, she asked me, would the English say if an Australian novelist, writing about England, should spell Bournmouth with an ‘e’? My first impulse was to answer that to the best of my belief the English wouldn’t turn a hair, even if it were incorrect, which in point of fact it wasn’t, but I thought it would better become me to suffer the lady’s stern rebuke in silence.

Unrelatedly, I guess today’s popular fiction doesn’t contain many sentiments like ‘Thus Julia out of her own head framed anew the platonic theory of ideas.’)

The reason I’m digressing so much already is that I don’t really want to write too much about the novel for fear of spoiling it, but I can at any rate give a little exposition: Julia Lambert, 46 and one of the most celebrated stage actresses of her generation, is married to Michael Gosselyn, 52, actor-manager of the Siddons Theatre in London. It’s not a marriage of grand passions, he’s what Alan Bennett would describe as ‘a husband on a low light’. Their son Roger, 17, is at Eton and bound for Cambridge. Enter Tom Fennell, a young accountant and Julia superfan, who shakes everything up.

I won’t discuss what ensues in any great detail, but what the novel boils down to ultimately is an exploration of Julia’s interior life as she prepares for and stars in a series of plays. She weathers several small crises (one involving a starlet called Avice Crichton, in a pre-echo of All About Eve) with varying degrees of success and occasional loss of face. Any theatrical type (raises hand) will lap it up, but it’s not just about the joy of putting on plays, it’s also about the compromises you make when you devote your life to the theatre. Who is Julia Lambert? To what extent is she playing a part in her personal life as well as her professional one? An early suggestion of this theme:

‘Beginners, please.’

Those words, though heaven only knew how often she had heard them, still gave her a thrill. They braced her like a tonic. Life acquired significance. She was about to step from the world of make-believe into the world of reality.

A later one (I loved this bit):

‘How different everything would have been if we’d bolted that time. Heigh-ho.’

She never quite knew what heigh-ho meant, but they used it a lot on the stage, and said with a sigh it always sounded very sad.

Maugham certainly has a gift for the telling pencil portrait. A case in point: the detail of the thinness of Michael’s lips, a neat shorthand for his stinginess (‘Michael flattered himself that there was not a management in London where less money was spent on the productions’).

Elsewhere, the modernness of the novel’s language and attitudes surprised me. It’s not just Julia’s pleasingly blunt epithets (cow here, bitch there, slut just around the corner), it’s the level of sexual detail. There’s a lot of queerness about: the minor character of Dolly de Vries, who bankrolls Julia’s career, is unambiguously lesbian and in love with Julia; others have a flavour of gayness to them, however faint, though homosexuality is mentioned only abstractly (but it is mentioned). The mere existence of sex scenes, which extend to mentions of the kissing of breasts (for instance), is impressive, less than ten years after the banning of Lady Chatterley; and there was one gag about pubic hair that made me laugh, though perhaps I read too much into it.

Maugham was a skilful playwright as well as a novelist (I enjoyed a touring production of The Circle when it came to town earlier this year), but perhaps it’s no surprise he thought the novel the better medium for this story. You’d lose much of Julia’s interior monologue if you staged it. Still, it has been staged and filmed over the years, inevitable given what a lively, dramatic and thoroughly theatrical piece of work it is.

‘Roger says we don’t exist. Why, it’s only we who do exist. They are the shadows and we give them substance. We are the symbols of all this confused, aimless struggling that they call life, and it’s only the symbol which is real …’

Tags: Books, Reading, Somerset Maugham, The 1937 Club, Theatre