It seems that Maugham had peddled his first play, Lady Frederick, to the offices of seventeen well-known London managers, until it came to rest in the Archives of the Court Theatre. The Court Theatre, standing in Sloane Square near the Tube station, is definitely outside the London theatre area, but as the scene of productions by the Stage Society, it is kept in the running. However, it might conceivably be the last port of call for a worn manuscript.
It so happened that Athole Stewart, the manager of the Court Theatre, found himself needing a play very badly during one season. The theatre had to be kept open and there was nothing to keep it open with. From a dingy pile of play manuscripts he chose Lady Frederick. He had no hopes of its success—or so it is said—but the success materialised. At the anniversary of Lady Frederick in London, Maugham thought of asking to dinner the seventeen managers who rejected the play, but realising that no man enjoyed being reminded of a lost opportunity he decided to forgo the pleasure.
The circumstances in which Caroline was written give an interesting reflex on Maugham as an artist. This delicious comedy was put on paper while Maugham was acting as British agent in Switzerland during the war. Some of its more amusing lines were written in some haste while a spy (of uncertain intentions toward Maugham) stood outside in the snow.
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Someone, probably the gifted Hector MacQuarrie, whom I fear I have guiltily been quoting in almost every sentence of this chapter, has said that Maugham writes “transcripts, not of life as a tolerable whole, but of phases which suit his arbitrary treatment.” It is an enlightening comment.
But Maugham himself is the keenest appraiser of his own intentions in his work, as when he spoke of the stories in his book, The Trembling of a Leaf, as not short stories, but “a study of the effect of the Islands of the Pacific on the white man.”
The man never stays still. When you think the time is ripe for him triumphally to tour America—when The Moon and Sixpence has attracted the widest attention—he insists on going immediately to China. This may be because, though well set up, black-eyed, broad-framed and excessively handsome in evening clothes, he is rather diffident.
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by W. Somerset Maugham