Mrs Craddock

by W. Somerset Maugham

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

“I thought it was you I saw coming up the hill,” she said, stretching out her hand.

He stopped and shook it; the touch of his big, firm fingers made her tremble. His hand was massive and hard as if it were hewn of stone. She looked up at him and smiled.

“Isn’t it cold?” she said. It is terrible to be desirous of saying all sorts of passionate things, while convention debars you from any but the most commonplace. (Excerpts from chapter 1.)

Release date: February 5, 2008

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Print pages: 304

Sample

Introduction

Somerset Maugham’s first published work, Liza of Lambeth, was a remarkable success for a beginning author. Published in September 1897, the novel was praised by a number of respected critics and, because it was mentioned in a Sunday night sermon at Westminster Abbey, its first printing was sold out. The young writer had demonstrated a deft hand at dialogue, an ability to create a vivid scene with a few carefully selected details, and a gift for drawing memorable characters. The strength of the book, however, lay in its authentic picture of the life of London’s poor that Maugham had observed when his duties as a medical student at St. Thomas’s Hospital required his venturing into the nearby slums. Protected by his doctor’s bag, he was led to the bedside of the ill and the dying “through the dark and silent streets of Lambeth, up stinking alleys and into sinister courts where the police hesitated to penetrate.”

Liza of Lambeth’s detailed re-creation of these experiences within the poor, uneducated underclass of London was timely. Under the influence of the French naturalists—notably Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and Edmond and Jules Goncourt—the last two decades of the nineteenth century had seen an outpouring of British realistic slum fiction. Arthur Morrison used his experiences in London’s East End to write the powerfully evocative Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and A Child of the Jago (1896); George Gissing produced a number of grimly realistic novels, notably Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Nether World (1889); Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot” (1893); and a multitude of lesser-known authors—Hubert Crackanthorpe, Edwin Pugh, St. John Adcock, Richard Whiteing, and William Pett Ridge, among others—made their reputations with stories of the down-and-out of London’s ghettos. Whether by astute planning or by fortunate coincidence, Maugham was able to contribute his own skillfully written and genuine picture of the mean streets to an already popular genre of fiction.

It might have been expected that the success of Liza of Lambeth would impel the young author to write more fiction based on his experiences in the London slums or in the outpatients’ department of St. Thomas’s Hospital. He had, however, discovered some articles on the novelist’s craft by the prominent critic Andrew Lang, and he took to heart one particular pronouncement. “It was absurd,” Maugham recalled Lang declaring, “for the young writer to write about his own day and the life about him. What could he know about them? The only novel he could hope to write that might have merit was a historical one. Here his lack of worldly wisdom, his vernal innocence, could be no hindrance.” Maugham followed this advice, and his next novel, The Making of a Saint, was a historical romance about Caterina Sforza and the siege of Forli, based on a story from Machiavelli’s History of Florence. He gathered his material in the reading room of the British Museum and wrote his novel during a summer vacation on Capri. The result was a failure: all the qualities—understatement, irony, realism, and detachment—that had transformed Maugham’s experience in the slums into compelling fiction were unsuited to historical romance. On its publication in 1898, he said, “The critics received it with coolness and the public with indifference.” Years later he wrote in his nephew Robin’s copy: “A very poor novel by W. Somerset Maugham.”

The failure of The Making of a Saint undermined the modest reputation Maugham had earned with Liza of Lambeth,and he was quick to learn his lesson. As he said much later, he came to realize that Lang’s dictum was “nonsense. In the first twenty-five years of his life the youth has gathered a multitude of impressions; if he has the novelist’s instincts he will probably have felt them more vividly than he will ever feel anything again; and the persons he has known, he will have known with an intimacy that in the turmoil and hurry of after life he will never achieve again. Who has ever known anyone later in such minute detail as a boy has known his relations, their friends and servants?”

Mrs Craddock was Maugham’s next novel, though publishers’ apprehensions about its contents delayed its publication until 1902, a year after The Hero, and it was solidly grounded on the experiences of the author’s early life. Maugham was born in Paris in 1874 to the wife of an English solicitor attached to the British embassy, and on the deaths of his mother when he was eight years old and his father two years later, he was sent to Kent to live with an aunt and an uncle, Henry MacDonald Maugham, the vicar of the seaside town of Whitstable. The couple were in their fifties and childless, and a small boy was an intrusion into a well-ordered household. Though young Willie grew to have some sort of affectionate relationship with his aunt, his uncle—from all accounts a narrow-minded, pedantic, lazy, and severe man—remained distant and unsympathetic. The effect on Maugham of this unhappy arrangement is indelibly captured in an entry in A Writer’s Notebook: “He had so little love when he was small that later it embarrassed him to be loved.”

Because of the vicar’s position in the community, the young Maugham got to observe the manners, customs, and attitudes of a rigidly stratified society, and, remembering the titled and cultured people who came to his parents’ stylish apartment on the Avenue d’Antin, he grew up with a contempt for the narrow social life of Kent. He was ashamed of the way in which his uncle deferred to the more important figures in the small community. “My uncle toadied to the local squire,” he told his nephew, “and the man was just a vulgar lout. He’d never have been tolerated in my mother’s drawing-room. My uncle was a cracking snob. I was never allowed even to speak to the local tradesmen.”

From an early age Maugham longed to escape from the emotional bleakness of the vicarage and from the narrowness of Whitstable life. Though it was some years before he was free, he found one form of escape that was to remain with him for the rest of his life—reading—and, ironically, he owed this discovery to his uncle’s considerable library. At least temporarily he could shake off the unhappiness of his physical confines and escape into the worlds ofThe Book of a Thousand and One Nights, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, and the adventure stories of Captain Marryat. Thus Maugham formed what he called in Of Human Bondage “the most delightful habit in the world,” one that provided him with “a refuge from all the distress of life.”

At the age of eleven, Maugham was boarded at The King’s School, six miles away in Canterbury, and he found the life there no more satisfying. Graphically described in the autobiographical Of Human Bondage, it was a miserable time for a small, shy boy with a stammer: Maugham was bullied by older, bigger boys, tormented by insensitive schoolmasters for whose intellects he had no respect, and bored by an unimaginative curriculum (more than once his name appeared in the School Black Book of boys’ misdeeds for “inattention” and “gross inattention”). He endured this existence for four years until, persuading his uncle that he should be permitted to study German in Heidelberg for several years, he left Kent behind.

Maugham had been born and spent his early childhood in Paris; twice during his King’s School days he had lived for several months in Hyères, on the French Riviera, when it appeared that he might be developing tuberculosis; and in Heidelberg he felt that he was in touch with the larger, cosmopolitan European world again. His two years in Germany were an intellectual awakening, and he came away with an understanding of many of the great avant-garde European writers—Henrik Ibsen, Henry Becque, and others—the works of revolutionary composers such as Richard Wagner; and the ideas of the most influential philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer and Benedict Spinoza. When Maugham returned to England at the age of eighteen, it was not to Kent but to London, first as an apprentice chartered accountant and then, in the autumn of 1892, as a medical student at St. Thomas’s.

Throughout his medical training Maugham maintained his contact with Whitstable until the death of the vicar in September 1897 severed the family connection. His periodic returns to the vicarage and the life of rural Kent reminded him of the narrowness and constraint from which he had fled, and he recorded his impressions in his notebook. These observations were, he commented later, “the expressions of a very young man’s reaction to real life, or what he thought was such, and to liberty, after the sheltered and confined existence, perverted by fond fancies and the reading of novels, which was natural to a boy in the class in which I was born; and they are the expression of his revolt from the ideas and conventions of the environment in which he had been brought up.”

Maugham may have revolted against the provincial ideas and conventions of Whitstable and Canterbury, but he never left them behind. In different ways they became a fundamental element of some of his best-known fiction. In Of Human Bondage, published in 1915, they are described almost clinically as part of the forces that shape the protagonist’s character and over which he must triumph if he is to become truly independent. In Cakes and Ale, which appeared fifteen years later, the portrayal is softened by a kind of warm nostalgia, though the mores and customs of rural Kent are still the disapproving background against which the more boisterous and sensual characters must rebel. In his earliest fiction dealing with his Kentish background—a short story called “Daisy” and Mrs Craddock—the tone is sharper, more satiric, and, because the experience was still so fresh in his mind, less forgiving.

“Daisy,” which Maugham said he wrote when he was eighteen and which was published in his short story collectionOrientations in 1899, tells how a young Blackstable girl elopes with a married army officer and is thus made an outcast from her family and her community. Abandoned by her lover, she is reduced to prostitution but escapes this life to become a theatrical star and to marry an aristocrat. Now affluent and having social status, she attempts to become reconciled with her family but is rejected, particularly by her rigidly unforgiving father. Daisy nonetheless settles £15 a week on them, but the story ends with her leaving Blackstable and her family forever.

Blackstable—as it is in Mrs Craddock, Of Human Bondage, and Cakes and Ale—is, of course, a thinly disguised Whitstable, and when Daisy takes a last, nostalgic walk through its streets before she departs, Maugham describes a town and its people he knew well:

Daisy walked down the High Street slowly looking at the houses she remembered, and her lips quivered a little; at every step smells blew across to her full of memories—the smell of a tannery, the blood smell of a butcher’s shop, the sea-odour from a shop of fishermen’s clothes. . . . She looked at the booths she knew so well, the boats drawn up for the winter, whose names she knew, whose owners she had known from her childhood . . . and she looked at the grey sea; a sob burst from her; but she was very strong, and at once she recovered herself. . . . At last she came to the station, and sat in the waiting room, her heart full of infinite sadness—the terrible sadness of the past.

In Daisy’s bittersweet final departure from Blackstable, it is easy to see Maugham’s own farewell to his past, and it is presented with the contempt of a young man who, like his protagonist, sees himself as part of the world far beyond its narrow and parochial boundaries. The townspeople are shown to be full of pretension, insincerity, and love of gossip. There is a good deal of religious hypocrisy and petty vindictiveness, and the text is dotted with ironic comments about “Christian,” “Christian way,” and “Providence.” Daisy’s weak and indecisive father is especially contemptible, initially concerned about her but then assuming the narrow voice of Victorian morality, prepared to forgive her when she is suffering for her sins but loathing her when she surmounts them to achieve success and happiness.

Mrs Craddock is another farewell to Maugham’s youth and upbringing, and it too is firmly grounded in his experiences of Kent. Here, as in Of Human Bondage and Cakes and Ale, the neighboring town of “Tercanbury” is based on Canterbury, and “Faversley” stands for Faversham. For “Court Leys,” the country house that Bertha Craddock has inherited, Maugham drew on his memories of Court Lees, an estate he would have seen a few miles out of Whitstable. The Regis (that is, “King”) School that Edward Craddock attended is clearly meant to be the author’s own school, The King’s School, Canterbury. Beyond the names, there are a great many details in Mrs Craddock that indicate that Maugham captured the life of his corner of Kent as faithfully as he had described London’s slums in Liza of Lambeth.

The French scholar Joseph Dobrinsky has written that Mrs Craddock depicts with “passionate veracity” a “painful experience of the author,” and there can be little doubt that, despite the gender transposition, there are autobiographical elements in the portrayal of Bertha Craddock. Like Maugham, Bertha has spent some of her formative years on the Continent, “educated as best could be in a half a dozen countries” while traveling with her father after her mother’s death. When Bertha was eighteen, her father died in Naples, and she spent the next three years touring Europe with her maiden aunt, experiencing the great cities, the ancient churches, and the art of the greatest galleries. Just as Maugham had become cosmopolitan in his years in France and Germany, Bertha developed a sophistication that alienates her from the parochial life of her native Kent. By contrast, her husband’s experience of the world has remained as circumscribed and provincial as his education at the Regis School.

Surely, too, in the final pages of the novel, Bertha’s retreat into literature and music as an escape from her empty marriage and the ennui of her life in rural Kent comes from the author’s own experience. Like the young Philip in Of Human Bondage—and perhaps the Maugham who all his life traveled with a bag full of books—she finds in reading “a refuge from all the distress of life.” She reads the Renaissance epic Orlando Furioso, John Lyly’s Euphues, the poetry of Paul Verlaine, the memoirs of Saint-Simon, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. “Bertha found reality tolerable,” writes Maugham, “when it was merely a background, a foil to the fantastic happenings of old books; she looked at the green trees, and the song of birds mingled agreeably with her thoughts still occupied with the Dolorous Knight of La Mancha, with Manon Lescaut, or the joyous band that wanders through the Decameron. . . . Living away from the present, in an artificial paradise, Bertha was happy.”

Bertha thus retreats from the disappointments of her emotional life into a world of detachment, ideas, and cosmopolitanism. In doing this she begins to emulate her aunt Polly Ley. Throughout the novel, Miss Ley’s cool objectivity and compassionate, non-judgmental detachment serve as a foil for her niece’s unrestrained passion, but at the end the younger woman adopts her aunt’s outlook on life.

Miss Ley must surely be a rarity among fictional characters in having a novel dedicated to her, as she is in Maugham’s Epistle Dedicatory to the early editions of Mrs Craddock. There he claims to have first met her in Naples, in the Gallery of Masterpieces while looking at a statue of Agrippina, a work of art that many years later he claimed was itself the inspiration for her character. It has been suggested, however, that the real model for Miss Ley was Maugham’s Aunt Julia, who had cultivated a close friendship with a very much younger man. Maugham’s own relationship with Julia was warm enough that he dedicated The Hero to her in 1901, and on her death nine years later, she left him her house near Hyde Park.

Miss Ley resembles Julia Maugham in some aspects, but it is very much more likely that she was based on Mrs. George W. Steevens, to whom Maugham dedicated The Explorer in 1907. Like many of the stage women of the time, she was a woman with a past, having suffered social exile because, as one of the mistresses of Sir Charles Dilke, she had a role in his divorce. Following this scandal, she rehabilitated her reputation with charitable work and married the very much younger George Steevens, a respected journalist who was killed while covering the Boer War for the Daily Mail in 1900. Having an independent income, Mrs. Steevens became one of London’s lion-hunting society hostesses, entertaining intellectual and bohemian London in her London flat and her house, Merton Abbey, situated about eight miles out of the city. Among the painters, actors, and writers who might be found at one of her evenings were Max Beerbohm, Henry Arthur Jones, Reggie Turner, George Street, William Pett Ridge, and the young Willie Maugham.

Maugham appreciated Mrs. Steevens’s wit, still sharp and lively for a septuagenarian, and was amused by her iconoclastic good sense. Because of the considerable difference in their ages, there was no sexual tension between them, and they developed the close relationship so common between homosexual men and older women. Like Miss Ley with Bertha, Mrs. Steevens lived apart from the pressures of Maugham’s professional career and the complications of his emotional life, and so she became a trusted confidante and mentor.

Maugham introduced Miss Ley in Mrs Craddock and developed her character more fully in The Merry-Go-Round,published in 1904 (in one of those careless slippages to which authors are sometimes prone, she is called variously “Mary Ley” and “Polly Ley” in both novels). Part confidante, part raisonneuse, and part chorus, she looks on the pretensions and follies of the other characters with a witty cynicism; at the same time, she observes their suffering with sensitivity and sympathy. She is an amusing commentator, fully independent, intelligent, and free of humbug.

Miss Ley may have been based on Mrs. Steevens but, as Maugham’s autobiographical writings reveal, she voices many of the author’s own beliefs (particularly in The Merry-Go-Round). Thus she marks an important stage in Maugham’s development as an author: in Laurence Brander’s words, she is “the first character in the oeuvre whom we can describe as typically Maugham.” Her persona, writes Frederic Raphael, “is the first to have the Maughamian quality of detached worldliness that he was to wish on Willie Ashenden and finally on the character whom he called Mr Maugham.”

Indeed, from Mrs Craddock on, in both his fiction and drama, Maugham increasingly told his stories through the eyes of detached, cynical observers or through a first-person narrator who places the reader at a filtered distance from the action. In The Moon and Sixpence, the amoral, compulsive painter Charles Strickland is described by a narrator who, being an author immersed in the London social and literary milieu, looks upon the tempests of his life with amusement and detachment. In Cakes and Ale, the narrator is again a writer who amuses himself by giving a portrait of a celebrated author, Edward Driffield, which undercuts the false, bowdlerized picture given the public by his first wife and her friends. Here the narrator is called Willie Ashenden, the same name given the cynical British espionage agent in Ashenden, a short-story collection based on Maugham’s experiences in World War I and published in 1928. By the time that he wrote The Razor’s Edge sixteen years later, the novelist and the narrator had virtually become one, and the avuncular cosmopolitan author who observes the passions and misadventures of a younger generation is called Mr. Maugham.

V. S. Pritchett once described the narrator of so much of Maugham’s fiction—and one might include here the many characters who function therein as shrewd and literate observers—as “the Great Dry Martini in person.” It was in both forms a persona that Anthony Burgess declared unique: “Here again was something that English fiction needed—the dispassionate commentator, the ‘raisonneur,’ the man at home in Paris and Vienna but also in Seoul and Djakarta, convivial and clubbable, as ready for a game of poker as for a discussion on the Racine alexandrine, the antithesis of the slippered bookman.” Miss Ley, at home in Florence and Paris, familiar with the social and cultural life of London, and ready to puncture the pretensions of the hidebound characters who frequent Court Leys, is the first of such voices in Maugham’s writing.

Set against the cosmopolitanism and culture of Bertha and Miss Ley is Bertha’s husband, Edward, who, as the anonymous reviewer in Academy and Literature recognized within weeks of the novel’s appearance, is its most fully delineated character:

The character of Edward Craddock, the gentleman-farmer, is drawn with absolute conviction. His lack of imagination, his impassivity, his equanimity, his good nature, his utter inability to put himself in another’s place, even the trait of obstinate vanity which leads to his too timely death—all these things combine to make a human mediocrity that is vividly alive.

Born into the yeoman class—that is, the class of small landowners and farmers—Craddock rises to the squirearchy through his marriage to Bertha, who has inherited Court Leys and the surrounding land. This betrothal, proposed and pursued with great vigor by Bertha, evokes outrage in her guardian, Dr. Ramsay, because Edward is not a gentleman and he seems to be interested in Bertha only for her money. As the squire of Court Leys, however, Craddock proves to be a good manager and careful businessman, and the estate thrives once again after years of neglect.

Ironically, at the time when his wife has grown beyond the values and outlook of the landed gentry of which her family has been part for a century, Craddock becomes almost a caricature of the British squire of the late nineteenth century. He is, writes Richard Cordell, “unimaginative, narrowly patriotic, energetically a good fellow, conservative, virtuous. He is a stupid and a happy man. He has no doubts, no struggles, no self-criticism.” Craddock is also a philistine, insensitive, and smugly patriarchal in dealing with his wife. “Women,” he says, “are like chickens. . . . Give ’em a good run, properly closed in with stout wire netting, so that they can’t get into mischief, and when they cluck and cackle just sit tight and take no notice.”

Published in November 1902, Mrs Craddock is technically an Edwardian novel, but since it was written several years earlier, it should more properly be considered one of the last pieces of British Victorian fiction. Moreover, its creation and publication occurred on either side of one of the profoundly important watershed events in the history of the British national character: the Boer War, when for two years a small and sparely equipped band of South African farmers and guerrilla fighters held the world’s greatest imperial power at bay. At the start of the war in 1899, the mood of the British ruling and moneyed classes was optimism and certainty—the empire, and its prestige and wealth, would inexorably grow. After the war, in which the Boers won much of what they had been fighting for, the country was shaken by doubt and the fear that its imperial power was waning.

Edward Craddock, however, being a late Victorian—Maugham identified the period in which the action of Mrs Craddock takes place as the 1890s—has none of these doubts and fears. He is sure of his right to control the estate of Court Leys, to rule his country (“I tell you,” he brags to his wife, “I shall be an M. P. before I die”), and to see that country dominate much of the world. He is convinced that there is no better music than “good honest homely English airs” and that the English are morally superior to the other races. “What we want now,” he tells Bertha, “is purity and reconstitution of the national life. I’m in favour of English morals, English homes, English mothers, and English habits.” It is the same confident jingoism that elicits thunderous applause when he speaks during his campaign to be elected a county councilor: “He turned the tap of patriotism full on; it gurgled out in a stream. He blew the penny trumpets of English purity, and the tin whistles of the British Empire, and he beat the big drum of the Great Anglo-Saxon race. He thanked God he was an Englishman and not as others are.”

As Mrs Craddock progresses, Craddock grows into his position of squire of Court Leys, and that growth is not merely in arrogance, complacency, and self-centeredness. In the opening pages, when Bertha is infatuated with the twenty-eight-year-old farmer, he is slender, youthful, and masculine. Within a few years of marriage and life as a landed gentleman, however, he begins to put on weight and change shape. “He was filling out,” observes Miss Ley, “prosperity and a consciousness of his great importance had broadened his back and straightened his shoulders; he was quite three inches more round the chest than when she had first known him, and his waist had proportionately increased. If he goes on developing in this way, she thought, the good man will be colossal by the time he’s forty.” In other words, if Craddock continues to develop as he has been doing, he will soon be the human equivalent of John Bull, the traditional cartoon caricature of self-satisfied, prosperous, middle-class Britain.

In making Court Leys, a country house, the focal point of Mrs Craddock, Maugham anticipated a practice that became common among British novelists in the decade that followed the book’s publication. In Edwardian Fiction,Jefferson Hunter provides a selection of these literary houses and offers an explanation for such a focus:

Worsted Skeynes, Robin Hill, Overdene, Hamlyn’s Purliew, Flickerbridge, Mundham, Burbeck, Catchmore, Weatherend, Newmarch, Matcham, Fawns, Mertle, Beccles, Holm Oaks, Bladesover, Lady Grove, Crest Hill, Pendragon, Friars Pardon, Violet Hill, Holmescroft, Hawkins’ Old Farm, Baskerville Hall, Windy Corner, Cadover, Oniton Grange, Howards End—these are the country houses of Edwardian fiction, and even when listed partially they suggest how heavily the imagination of the decade was invested in landed property.

Novelists used the big house for a number of reasons—one of the simplest being as a confined space within which their fiction could operate—but in many cases, as Hunter points out, “the country house was a definition of England itself.” What happens within the house and its environs, and to its occupants, becomes a microcosm of what is happening to the country as a whole. For example, the question of ownership of Howards End, in E. M. Forster’s novel of the same name, really stands for the question of who should control England: the generous, cultured middle class as embodied by the Schlegel sisters or the entrepreneurs and men of business as exemplified by the men of the Wilcox family.

These contesting approaches are epitomized early in the novel by the clash between Henry’s management of Howards End and his first wife’s wishes for the house, the ancestral home she has brought into the marriage. Enamored of machinery and modernization, and insensitive to her love of tradition and a more organic life, Henry has the horse paddock converted to a garage. As the novel goes on and Mrs. Wilcox dies, Henry’s remarriage, to Margaret Schlegel, is meant to represent a synthesis of the two fundamentally different approaches to life and society, and Margaret’s ultimate ownership of Howards End is Forster’s formula for the future for the country.

Eight years before Forster had created Howards End, Maugham had given readers Court Leys, and he anticipated Forster by showing the clash between Edward Craddock’s utilitarian management of the estate that he, like Henry Wilcox, has assumed by marriage and Bertha’s reverence for her family’s t