Dictionary of Literary Biography on W(illiam) Somerset Maugham
Novelist, playwright, short-story writer, travel writer, autobiographer, and essayist, W. Somerset Maugham wrote only one collection of short stories that justifies his inclusion in any discussion of spy fiction: Ashenden; or The British Agent (1928). Statements by Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John le Carré (David Cornwell), among others, about that book's influence upon their writing of spy fiction testify to Maugham's importance to the development of that genre.
William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874 and lived the first ten years of his life there. His mother died in 1882. His father, a lawyer, died in 1884. At age ten he went to live with his clergyman uncle in Kent. His unhappy attendance at an English public school (the King's School in Canterbury), his liberating year of study abroad in Heidelberg (with his concomitant loss of religious faith), and his return to England to take up medical studies in London are all recounted in fictional form in his semi-autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage (1915). These events served in part to shape the character of a man who was sensitive and perceptive yet also timorous and withdrawn, an outside observer of life's experiences rather than one totally and passionately immersed in them. In this respect Maugham was like many of his fictional narrators and protagonists, among them his British agent Ashenden.
Financially Maugham was one of the most successful professional writers of all time, and that success enabled him eventually to buy the Villa Mauresque, his fortresslike retreat on the French Riviera, where he entertained writers, statesmen, and members of fashionable society, but where he was also able to withdraw from the world (when he was not traveling). He died there in 1965 at the age of ninety-one.
During World War I Maugham was recruited by British intelligence and spent much of 1916 in Geneva as a British espionage agent. He also worked briefly the following year in Russia (his assignment was to try to prevent the Russian Revolution from happening). It was out of these experiences that the stories in Ashenden; or The British Agent came. No doubt the book's influence is due to the fact that it is based on firsthand experience (unlike much of the melodramatic fiction that preceded it). Maugham characterizes his espionage experience, in his preface to the book, as largely humdrum, thereby justifying imparting to the stories a low-key and resolutely antisensational, antiheroic quality. He says, "The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole extremely monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic and probable." The drama that Maugham introduces, and which makes the work rank with his best fiction, is the drama of human beings realistically and compassionately observed as, for the most part, creatures of circumstance rather than as extraordinarily efficacious heroes or fantastically depraved villains.
Ashenden; or The British Agent consistently rejects the conventions and clichés of the spy genre of the time. There are no shoot-outs, no chase scenes, no cloak-and-dagger intrigue in which the clever spy plays cat and mouse with the fiendishly clever counterspy. There are no double agents in these stories. Instead there are situations like that in which the killer hired by British intelligence, a fantastic character called the Hairless Mexican (who would not be out of place in the pages of John Buchan, Sapper [H.C. McNeile], or E. Phillips Oppenheim), boasts of his extraordinary prowess but is ultimately discovered, to Ashenden's horror, to have killed the wrong man. In "Giulia Lazzari" a woman is coerced by British intelligence to betray into their hands her lover, an anti-British Indian agitator, only to amaze Ashenden when at the story's end, learning of her lover's suicide, she asks if she can have back the watch she gave him--it cost her twelve pounds and she needs the money. Or in "The Traitor" Ashenden is instrumental in bringing about the capture of a British subject who has turned German spy; but much of the story is devoted to Ashenden's ambivalent feelings about destroying a human being with interesting and appealing qualities, and also with depicting the agonies suffered by the doomed traitor's wife as she slowly realizes he has been delivered over to execution. Repeatedly in these stories the human dimension receives the major stress, the actual espionage (if there is any) being only the frame upon which that human story is woven.
"Miss King" probably illustrates better than any of the other stories Maugham's resolute refusal to let the melodramatic and sensational dominate in these stories. It is about the very failure of melodramatic intrigue to materialize. Ashenden wonders what conspiratorial meaning can attach to the simultaneous presence at his hotel of the Baroness de Higgins and the Count von Holzminden, both suspected German agents, and the mysterious Egyptian Prince Ali, into whose room Ashenden is lured ostensibly to make a fourth at bridge. These fantastic characters quickly fade, however, as readers realize that the real center of the story is Miss King, the old British governess of the prince's daughters. But when Ashenden is summoned in the middle of the night to the dying old woman's bedside, he still believes intrigue is at the heart of it: the old woman, he thinks, knowing he is a spy, wishes to impart some significant piece of secret intelligence to him. What occurs instead is something both less sensational and more movingly human: with her dying breath the wizened Miss King, who has not seen her native land for many years, whispers in Ashenden's ear the word England. The story, ultimately, is not about espionage or intrigue at all but, rather, about a lonely old woman's sad longing in exile.
The character of Ashenden is recognizably human, too, looking, not surprisingly, a lot like Maugham himself (Maugham would use the name Ashenden again, years later, for the semi-autobiographical narrator-protagonist of Cakes and Ale: Or the Skeleton in the Cupboard, 1930). Like Maugham he is a successful novelist and playwright; like Maugham also he is a shy and somewhat withdrawn man, who prefers to stand a little to one side of life and watch rather than plunge into its rushing mainstream. But Ashenden also perceptively observes, as his creator no doubt also did, some of the dehumanizing aspects, and also some of the supreme moral folly, of the spying game and those who control it. He recognizes the ruthlessness of "R.," his control (a character of whom both Ian Fleming and John le Carré would later make much use). He likewise recognizes the basic decency of some of the villains he pursues, men whose only difference from Ashenden and R. is that they are on the other side. About Chandra Lal, the dangerous Indian agitator, Ashenden says to R.:
"I don't suppose he'd use bombs if he could command a few batteries and half a dozen battalions. He uses what weapons he can. You can hardly blame him for that. After all, he's aiming at nothing for himself, is he? He's aiming at freedom for his country. On the face of it it looks as though he were justified in his actions.... I shall carry out your instructions, that's what I'm here for, but I see no harm in realizing that there's something to be admired and respected in him."
And later, Ashenden becomes involved in a plot to blow up a munitions factory in Austria, the positive result of which will be an undermining of the German war effort, but the drawback will be the death and mutilation of many innocent civilians in that factory. Ashenden says:
It was not of course a thing that the big-wigs cared to have anything to do with. Though ready enough to profit by the activities of obscure agents of whom they had never heard, they shut their eyes to dirty work so that they could put their clean hands on their hearts and congratulate themselves that they had never done anything that was unbecoming to men of honour.... They were all like that. They desired the end, but hesitated at the means. They were willing to take advantage of an accomplished fact, but wanted to shift on to someone else the responsibility of bringing it about.
The element of moral ambiguity, which Ashenden's consciousness brings into the stories, is one of Maugham's greatest contributions to the genre of spy fiction. As Julian Symons observed, "Once the convention of the agent as hero had been questioned by Maugham, it collapsed, and from the mid-thirties onward the spy story and thriller became for British writers a vehicle through which to ask the questions about society which still could not easily be expressed in the detective story." Maugham's place as innovator in and shaper of the genre of spy fiction would therefore seem to be established.
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