THE RELUCTANT AGENT, Somerset Maugham, the Secret War, and The Making of Ashenden, David Lane intro

[00:00:03]Hi, my name is David Christopher Lane.

[00:00:05]I'm a professor of philosophy at Mount San Antonio College, where I've been there for almost 38 years.

[00:00:11]Uh prior to that, I taught at the California State University of Long Beach for more than a decade. And prior to that, I taught at the University of California, San Diego for 5 years in the Warren College program, where I was getting my PhD in the sociology of knowledge.

[00:00:28]Prior to that, I uh taught high school.

[00:00:30]I was getting my master's degree up at Berkeley, and I taught at Moreau High School for 2 years. Then I taught at Chaminade College Prep for 1.

[00:00:39]Then I taught at the University of San Diego High School for 2 years. And I think the most uh interesting part of those high schools was I was the head of the surf uh club. And we used to go surfing all the time. It was a lot of fun.

[00:00:51]Um today, I want to introduce uh an interesting aspect of Somerset Maugham's life.

[00:00:57]A lot of people don't know, but he was actually a secret agent in the night uh World War I, and it actually contributed to his later uh work called Ashenden, in which he talks about being a spy and a detective.

[00:01:11]And a lot of people have been influenced, including Graham Greene and others, including George Orwell, were influenced by Maugham's writings. Uh so, I think you're going to enjoy it. It's an intriguing aspect of his life.

[00:01:22]And one last thing about teaching, uh you know, I'm now 70 years old, and I think I'll probably retire at the age of 72, if not beforehand. You know, you get to a certain age and you become an old codger. But I have a a young son who's 20, just graduated from UC Berkeley. And then I have another son who also graduated from Berkeley, and he's 25.

[00:01:41]And then you start to understand that generation, which is a very interesting one. They live in a much different time than than we did. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy the Somerset Maugham as a spy.

[00:01:52]>> The Reluctant Agent: Somerset Maugham, The Secret War, and the Making of Ashenden.

[00:01:58]One: A Playwright Crosses the lake.

[00:02:02]In the winter of 1915, guests at a comfortable hotel in Geneva might have noticed a small, dark, immaculately dressed Englishman of about 40 taking his coffee alone, working through the mornings at a play.

[00:02:16]He was easy to place.

[00:02:18]William Somerset Maugham was one of the most famous writers alive.

[00:02:23]The man who, 7 years earlier, had four plays running simultaneously in the West End, an unprecedented feat that had prompted Punch to print a cartoon of Shakespeare biting his nails in envy before the playbills.

[00:02:37]His enormous, bruising novel of human bondage had just been published.

[00:02:42]If anyone asked what he was doing in neutral Switzerland in the middle of a world war, the answer was self-evident and true.

[00:02:51]He was writing.

[00:02:52]It was the truth, and it was also the cover.

[00:02:56]Once a week, in all weathers, Maugham boarded the little steamer that crossed Lake Geneva to the French shore, carrying in his head, and sometimes more dangerously in his pockets, the accumulated intelligence of a network of British agents operating inside Germany.

[00:03:14]On the French side, he handed over his reports, received his instructions, and returned across the gray water to Switzerland, where espionage was a crime and the police were watchful.

[00:03:27]The crossings were cold and rough.

[00:03:30]Maugham, whose lungs were already tubercular, would later be entitled to say, and being Maugham would say it with a shrug rather than a flourish, that the secret service had very nearly killed him, not with a bullet but with a chill.

[00:03:45]Nothing about the arrangement was romantic, and that was precisely the point Maugham would spend the rest of his life making.

[00:03:52]Out these lake crossings and out of a far stranger mission to revolutionary Russia 2 years later would come Ashenden or The British Agent, 1928. The book that invented the modern spy story by the simple radical act of telling the truth about the work that it was mostly tedious, frequently absurd, occasionally cruel, and almost never glamorous.

[00:04:17]Every disillusioned fictional spy of the 20th century, Eric Ambler's stumbling amateurs, Graham Greene's burnt-out cases, John le Carré's gray men of the Circus, descends from the fastidious, watchful, ironical figure more modeled on himself and named Ashenden.

[00:04:36]To understand how the book came to be written, one has to understand how thoroughly its author was made for the work and how little he thought of it.

[00:04:45]Two, the making of a watcher.

[00:04:49]Maugham came to espionage with a spy's biography already complete. He was born in the British Embassy in Paris in 1874, so that French was his first language and England, when he finally saw it, a foreign country.

[00:05:04]His adored mother died when he was eight, his father 2 years later, and the orphan was shipped to the vicarage of an unloving uncle in Whitstable, where the shock of grief and displacement lodged in his throat as a stammer that would humiliate and isolate him for 90 years.

[00:05:21]A stammerer learns early to say less than he knows.

[00:05:25]He learns to watch other people talk, to read the room he cannot easily command, to keep his inner life behind glass.

[00:05:33]It was the perfect training.

[00:05:35]Then came medicine. At St. Thomas's Hospital in the Lambeth slums, where he qualified as a doctor in the 1890s, Maugham attended by his own count dozens of births in the tenements and watched people die without dignity or consolation. The wards taught him what the vicarage had begun, that human beings under pressure are rarely noble, that motive is mixed, that sentimentality is a form of lying.

[00:06:03]His first novel, Liza of Lambeth, 1897, was clinical in every sense. And its success let him abandon medicine for literature, though he liked to say that he never stopped practicing diagnosis.

[00:06:17]He had merely changed patients.

[00:06:19]There was one more qualification, and it was the deepest.

[00:06:23]Maugham was homosexual in the England that had destroyed Oscar Wilde while Maugham was a medical student. He would eventually describe himself in a famous formulation as having tried to persuade himself he was three-quarters normal and only a quarter queer when the truth was the reverse.

[00:06:41]Whatever the arithmetic, the consequence was a life conducted in code, a public self, urbane and unreadable, a private self, guarded like a document in a safe.

[00:06:53]He did not need to be taught tradecraft.

[00:06:56]He had been living under a cover identity since adolescence.

[00:07:00]When war came in August 1914, Maugham was 40, too old for a commission, and restless.

[00:07:08]He joined a Red Cross ambulance unit in France and Flanders as an interpreter and orderly, one of that odd cohort of writers later nicknamed the literary ambulance drivers.

[00:07:20]Amid the wreckage of the first winter of the war, he met a charming, dissolute 22-year-old American named Gerald Haxton, who became his companion, secretary, and the great attachment of his life.

[00:07:33]And at some point in 1915, at a party in London, a well-connected acquaintance made a suggestion. A man like Maugham, famous, multilingual, with every reason to be seen loitering in a neutral country, might be useful to a certain department of the government that did not advertise.

[00:07:53]Three. No thanks and no help, Switzerland.

[00:07:58]The man who recruited him was Captain, later Major, John Walinger, who ran British networks operating into Germany from France and Switzerland, and who would sit for the sardonic spymaster R in the Ashenden stories.

[00:08:12]The terms of employment were memorable chiefly for their bleakness.

[00:08:17]In the book, R lays them out to Ashenden in a sentence that Maugham always insisted was reportage rather than invention.

[00:08:26]"If you do well, you'll get no thanks, and if you get into trouble, you'll get no help."

[00:08:31]Maugham accepted anyway, and accepted remarkably without pay on the reasoning that the work would keep his French polished and might furnish material.

[00:08:41]Even at the moment of recruitment, the writer was fencing off his share of the loot.

[00:08:46]His first assignment was a small masterpiece of the genre's true flavor.

[00:08:51]He was sent to Lucerne to look into an Englishman married to a German wife, suspected of working for German intelligence, an episode he would transmute with icy perfection into the Ashenden story The Traitor, in which the agent Grantly Caypor, doting on his wife and his bull terrier, is coaxed across the French frontier to be shot.

[00:09:14]Then Maugham settled in Geneva under his own name, ostensibly at work on a comedy, actually functioning as a letterbox and paymaster, receiving reports from agents inside Germany, forwarding instructions, filing his weekly summaries, making the lake crossing to France and back. What struck him, and what he never tired of saying afterward, was the crushing ordinariness of it.

[00:09:39]The work, he wrote in the preface to Ashenden, was on the whole monotonous and a good deal of it uncommonly useless. The observation of a man who had expected at least the dignity of danger and found instead the rhythms of a branch office.

[00:09:55]His reports went up the chain and vanished.

[00:09:58]He compared the agent's position to that of a clerk who adds his column of figures without ever seeing the balance sheet.

[00:10:06]There were flickers of melodrama at the margins. The Swiss police made inquiries about the celebrated author who received so many visitors. There were couriers who might be doubled, informants who invented what they could not discover, and hotel corridors full of the war's flotsam, like the ancient English governess of an Egyptian household who would become the dying Miss King of one of the strangest stories in the book.

[00:10:32]But the flickers only emphasized the surrounding gray.

[00:10:36]Espionage, Maugham concluded, appealed simultaneously to his sense of romance and his sense of the ridiculous, and the ridiculous on the evidence was winning.

[00:10:46]By the autumn of 1916, his health had broken down under the wet crossings and the Geneva winters, and his personal life had become more dangerous than his professional one.

[00:10:58]His affair with Syrie Wellcome, interior decorator, daughter of the philanthropist Thomas Barnardo, estranged wife of the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome, had produced a daughter, Liza, and then a divorce suit in which Maugham was named. He resigned from the Swiss operation, escaped to the South Seas with Haxton to gather the material that would become The Moon and Sixpence, and in May 1917 in New Jersey, with the enthusiasm of a man keeping a dental appointment, married Syrie.

[00:11:31]He was 43, newly married, tubercular, and done, he assumed, with Secret Service.

[00:11:38]He was wrong. The most extraordinary chapter was about to begin.

[00:11:44]Four. The Impossible Errand, Petrograd 1917.

[00:11:50]In the summer of 1917, while Maugham was in the United States, he was approached by Sir William Wiseman, the improbably young baronet who ran British intelligence in New York, and had made himself indispensable to Colonel House, and through House, to President Wilson.

[00:12:08]Wiseman had a proposition of a different order of magnitude.

[00:12:12]Russia, convulsed since March by revolution, its army dissolving, its provisional government under Alexander Kerensky staggering between the resurgent right and the Bolshevik left, was wavering toward a separate peace with Germany.

[00:12:27]If Russia left the war, some 40 German divisions would be freed for the Western Front.

[00:12:33]Maugham's mission: go to Petrograd under commercial cover, support the moderate socialist government, organize pro-Allied propaganda, counter the German and pacifist agitation, and keep Russia fighting.

[00:12:47]It was considered soberly a preposterous assignment for a middle-aged novelist with a stammer, no Russian, and one functioning lung.

[00:12:57]Maugham considered it soberly, pointed out his tuberculosis, and took the job, this time for pay, having learned in Geneva what unpaid virtue was worth.

[00:13:08]He was given the code name Somerville, a cipher, and $21,000 in cash and credits, the first installment of a fund that Wiseman, drawing on both British and American sources, hoped to expand enormously.

[00:13:24]In late July, he sailed from San Francisco for Vladivostok by way of Japan in the company of four Czech nationalists sent by the exiled leader Tomas Masaryk, whose organization of Czech and Slovak exiles and eventually of the Czech Legion recruited from prisoners of war was one of the assets Moore was to coordinate.

[00:13:46]From Vladivostok, he crossed the entire breadth of Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, sharing the endless journey with, among others, a garrulous, kindly, unstoppably talkative American businessman whose portrait, under the name Mr. Harrington, would become the comic and then heartbreaking center of the finest story he ever wrote.

[00:14:08]Petrograd in September 1917 was a capital coming apart with a kind of feverish gaiety.

[00:14:15]Moore installed himself at the Hotel Europe and set about his work with the tools available to him, which turned out to be characteristically dinner parties. His indispensable ally was Alexandra "Sasha" Kropotkin, daughter of the famous anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, whom had known and briefly romanced in London years before. Sasha knew everyone. More to the point, she knew Kerensky.

[00:14:44]Once a week, at Moore's expense and the British taxpayers' ultimate cost, the Prime Minister of Russia dined with the novelist at the Medved restaurant, where the caviar and vodka flowed with a lavishness Moore found faintly obscene in a starving city and which he justified on the grounds that the secret service was paying and the guests were the government of Russia.

[00:15:07]What he saw across the table did not reassure him. Kerensky, the man of the hour, the orator whose speeches had once electrified the Duma, struck Moore as exhausted, vain, indecisive, and visibly shrinking under the weight of events. A man, he thought, more frightened of doing the wrong thing than determined to do the right one.

[00:15:30]Far more impressive was Boris Savinkov, the former terrorist who had organized the assassinations of Grand Duke Sergey and the Interior Minister Pleve, and had served as Kerensky's Deputy War Minister. A soft-spoken, deadly, hypnotic figure who Maugham would call the most extraordinary man he had ever met.

[00:15:52]The novelist in Maugham cataloged them all. The agent filed increasingly gloomy dispatches. His cables to Weizmann sketched an ambitious scheme, a properly funded propaganda bureau, support for the Mensheviks and the national minorities, a budget running to half a million dollars a year, and carried between the lines a diagnosis: The patient was dying.

[00:16:15]The end came with an irony so neat that no editor would have allowed Maugham to invent it.

[00:16:21]On October 31st, Kerensky summoned him and entrusted him with a secret message for the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, too sensitive to put on paper.

[00:16:32]It was a plea from a drowning man, guns and ammunition, a coordinated Allied propaganda offensive, and a detail with its own pathos, the replacement of the British ambassador whose disdain Kerensky could no longer bear.

[00:16:48]Maugham, terrified that his stammer would strangle the message in the delivery, reduced it to notes in his private cipher and left Petrograd the next day, traveling through Norway and crossing the North Sea to Scotland aboard a British destroyer.

[00:17:04]He reached Downing Street in mid-November and performed his errand.

[00:17:08]Lloyd George listened, was charming, and declined.

[00:17:12]When Maugham asked what he should tell Kerensky, the Prime Minister answered simply that he couldn't do what was asked and the interview was over.

[00:17:20]Whether the message beat the Bolshevik Revolution to London or arrived in its wake is a point on which memory and the record politely disagree.

[00:17:29]What is certain is that it made no difference.

[00:17:33]On November 7th, Lenin's forces seized the Winter Palace. Kerensky fled in a borrowed car and the government Maugham had been sent to sustain ceased to exist.

[00:17:45]The agent Somerville was proposing to return to Russia by way of Bergen when the news made the question academic.

[00:17:52]Maugham's verdict on his own mission was delivered years later with the exact mixture of modesty and monstrous vanity that made him Maugham.

[00:18:01]"The thing was impossible from the start." he conceded. And yet he could not help thinking that if he had been sent six months earlier, he might have pulled it off.

[00:18:11]It is one of the great deadpan sentences in the literature of espionage. The little stammering novelist alone reversing the Russian Revolution with dinner parties given adequate lead time.

[00:18:24]He may even have half believed it. What he wholly believed was the lesson underneath. That history is a machine indifferent to cleverness. That governments improvise. That secret missions are sent too late with too little by men who will accept no blame.

[00:18:41]And that all of this was from a certain angle superb material.

[00:18:47]Five.

[00:18:49]The Sanatorium and the Long Silence.

[00:18:54]The mission's last casualty was the agent's body.

[00:18:57]Maugham arrived back from Russia coughing blood. The tuberculosis, aggravated by two years of lake steamers and revolutionary winters, had flowered in both lungs. He spent much of the next two years at a sanatorium at Nordrach on Dee in the Scottish Highlands, flat on his back in the frost, an interlude he bore with suspicious contentment, writing plays in his head, watching his fellow patients conduct their intrigues and love affairs in the antechamber of death, and storing that away, too.

[00:19:28]It surfaced decades later in Sanatorium, in which the convalescent is, of course, Ashenden.

[00:19:35]And then, for a decade, he said almost nothing about any of it.

[00:19:40]The 1920s made Maugham the highest-paid, most-traveled, most-professionally-envied writer in the world.

[00:19:46]The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil, the short stories of the Malayan planters and their murderous wives, the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat with Haxton installed as master of revels.

[00:19:59]The war years sat in his notebooks like undetonated ordnance.

[00:20:03]Discretion was partly temperamental and partly legal. He had signed away his freedom to publish under the Official Secrets Act, and the material touched living agents and unhealed operations.

[00:20:15]The story that has come down, told often enough and plausible enough to have earned its place in the legend, is that Maugham eventually wrote some 31 stories from his intelligence years and burned 14 of them after Winston Churchill, who knew where the bodies were buried because he had helped bury several, warned him that publication would violate the act.

[00:20:38]What survived the fire, shaped and fused and alchemized, appeared in 1928 as Ashenden, or The British Agent, dedicated to Gerald Haxton.

[00:20:51]Six: The Anti-Romance.

[00:20:54]What Ashenden did to the spy story.

[00:20:59]To feel the shock Ashenden delivered in 1928, one has to remember what spy fiction was before it.

[00:21:06]The genre belonged to William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim, and the muscular Christianity of John Buchan, master criminals, stolen plans, chases across the moors, and heroes whose chins preceded them into danger.

[00:21:21]Morwyn, who had actually done the work, replaced all of it with an office. His Ashenden is a writer by profession, recruited for exactly Morwyn's reasons.

[00:21:32]Languages, plausible cover, the habit of studying people, and set to exactly Morwyn's tasks.

[00:21:39]He runs agency mostly never meets, files reports into a void, waits in hotel rooms, crosses the lake, obeys instructions whose purpose he is not told, and whose outcomes he never learns.

[00:21:53]R, his chief, is neither father figure nor fiend, but something more unsettling, a bureaucrat of human weakness deploying seducers and assassins with the detachment of a man ordering stationery, and famously unwilling to put anything compromising in writing.

[00:22:10]The stories refuse every consolation of the genre. In The Hairless Mexican, Ashenden shepherds a flamboyant hired killer to Naples to intercept a Greek courier. The assassination goes off flawlessly, except that they have killed the wrong man, and the story simply stops there, on the telegram announcing the error, one of the most brutal endings in English short fiction.

[00:22:35]In Giulia Lazzari, Ashenden blackmails a shabby dancer into luring her lover, an Indian nationalist working with the Germans, across the Swiss frontier to his death.

[00:22:46]The operation succeeds, and the reader is left holding the moral bill, because Ashenden declines to.

[00:22:54]Her final request for the return of a wrist watch her dead lover had given her closes the story like a door on a crypt.

[00:23:03]In The Traitor, the doomed capo is the most sympathetic character on the page, and his innocent, hectoring German wife the most faithful. Patriotism and betrayal wear the same tweeds and walk the same dog. And then there is Mr. Harrington's Washing, the Petrograd story, in which everything Maugham witnessed in Russia Kerensky's vanity, the collapse Sasha Kropotkin, lightly disguised as the soulful Anastasia Alexandrovna, the whole doomed errand becomes the backdrop to the fate of a fussy, decent, unbearable American businessman who has talked his way across Siberia and will not leave the burning city without the laundry he has paid for.

[00:23:46]He goes to collect it as the machine guns open up and is found dead in the street, the neat bundle still under his arm.

[00:23:54]It is comedy, reportage, and requiem at once, and it makes the largest political catastrophe of the century legible through the smallest possible aperture, one man's clean shirts.

[00:24:06]No writer has ever found a more Maughamesque image for the relation of the individual to history.

[00:24:13]The book's influence was immediate, subterranean, and permanent. Alfred Hitchcock fused The Traitor and The Hairless Mexican into Secret Agent, 1936 with John Gielgud as an Ashenden already recognizably modern in his distaste for his own orders.

[00:24:31]Eric Ambler and Graham Greene absorbed the book's central discovery, that the interest of a spy story lies not in the secret, but in the moral expense of obtaining it.

[00:24:42]Raymond Chandler admired its flint. Ian Fleming, whose Bond is in most respects Ashenden's gaudy opposite, acknowledged the debt, and Le Carré's entire world the shabby safe houses, the field man as clerk, the chief who spends men like currency, the operation that succeeds at the cost of everything it was meant to protect, is Ashenden's estate developed.

[00:25:06]Le Carré himself said that Maugham was the first to write about espionage from the standpoint of disenchanted reality.

[00:25:14]When Ashenden reappeared two years later as the narrator of Cakes and Ale, no longer a spy, just a novelist named Willie, Maugham was quietly confirming what readers had guessed. The mask and the face were the same.

[00:25:30]Seven.

[00:25:31]The Cynic's Ledger.

[00:25:35]What did Maugham himself think it had all meant?

[00:25:38]The record of his reflections in the Ashenden preface, in The Summing Up, 1938, in A Writer's Notebook, 1949, in the scandalous late memoir Looking Back, is a masterclass in the tone that made him both beloved and distrusted.

[00:25:55]The tone of a man determined never to be caught caring. He insisted first on the tedium.

[00:26:01]The agent's work, he maintained, was as orderly and monotonous as a city clerk's, and the parts that were not monotonous were mostly useless.

[00:26:10]He insisted second on the artifice of his own book.

[00:26:14]Fact, he wrote in the preface, is a poor storyteller.

[00:26:18]It starts stories it doesn't finish and drops its best characters without explanation.

[00:26:24]And so the work of the writer on raw experience was not embellishment, but the imposition of form on material that life had left shapeless.

[00:26:33]This was characteristically both a modest confession that Ashenden was fiction and an immodest claim that the fiction was truer than the facts.

[00:26:43]British intelligence appears to have agreed with the confession more than the claim. The stories were realistic enough that decades later trainee officers were reportedly pointed toward them as the least misleading account of the trade in print, but the cynicism went deeper than genre correction, and it is worth being precise about its quality because Maugham's cynicism is routinely misdescribed. It was not bitterness. He found the world too entertaining for that.

[00:27:14]And it was not quite disillusion because he had taken care never to be illusioned in the first place.

[00:27:21]It was the settled conviction acquired in the Whitstable vicarage and confirmed in the Lambeth wards and notarized in Petrograd that human beings are inconsistent, that motives are mixed, that institutions are improvisations, and that the man who expects otherwise has only himself to blame.

[00:27:42]Espionage suited this creed perfectly, which is why he could describe the work as appealing at once to his sense of romance and his sense of the ridiculous.

[00:27:51]The romance was real. The codes, the false names, the destroyer in the North Sea, the message memorized for a prime minister.

[00:28:00]The ridiculousness was more real.

[00:28:03]The wrong man shot in Naples, the empire's Russia policy conducted over caviar by a novelist who couldn't say the letter M without a struggle.

[00:28:13]The great message delivered to a government that no longer existed.

[00:28:18]There was vanity in the ledger, too, and Maugham, honest about everyone including himself, entered it.

[00:28:24]He was proud of having been asked, proud of the destroyer, proud of that outrageous 6 months earlier.

[00:28:31]He liked knowing secrets. The stammering outsider from the vicarage had been let, at last, into the innermost room and had found it furnished like every other room, which was both a disappointment and a vindication. And beneath the vanity lay the thing he never quite said, though the whole shape of his life says it, that espionage was for him less an interruption of his existence than a formalization of it.

[00:28:57]He had always lived under cover. He had always run a double life, always edited his dispatches, always watched from behind the glass of the stammer and the greater glass of the secret he could not publish about himself.

[00:29:11]When R tells Ashenden that he'll get no thanks and no help, he is describing the terms not just of the secret service but of the closet. And Morm had accepted those terms long before Wallinger bought him lunch.

[00:29:25]Perhaps that is why, alone among the writers of his generation, he could make the spy a figure of realism rather than fantasy.

[00:29:33]The others had to imagine what it was like to pass as something you were not, to be valued for your usefulness and disowned at your first mistake, to feel that your truest self was a document filed where no one would ever read it.

[00:29:47]Morm only had to describe his week.

[00:29:50]Out of the lake steamers and the doomed dinners at the Medved, out of the burned stories and the ones that survived, he built the 20th century's first honest account of secret work and left, in Ashenden's cool, amused, unforgiving gaze, the most complete self-portrait he ever allowed. A man watching the human comedy from excellent seats, taking notes, expecting nothing, and finding that nothing reliably delivered was the one thing life could be trusted to provide.

[00:30:23]The old spy's revenge was total. The department got his reports, literature got the balance sheet.

[00:30:47]>> Mhm.