Up At The Villa was one of the first books I read in my thesis, which I am unofficially calling “Operation: Free Willie” or else I will not get any reading or any writing done. In an attempt to help me do my reading and work, I have decided to put out some reviews of the books I’m reading, not only to help me understand Maugham but also to recommend some books to read (speaking of which, a 2023 Book Year in Review is forthcoming). The first book I read after I decided on my topic Maugham was Up At The Villa. This book has everything: fascism, passion from all characters in the highest tenors that only Maugham, an expert in that realm of human behavior, could do so, and a chronicle of a conflict over imperialism and neocolonialism, all through one rich widow’s choice of suitors.
The Plot
Meet Mary Panton, a recent widow from one year before and living at an Italian villa that the owners, the Leonards, let her stay for as long as she wants. While she is there, she is given a proposal by Edgar Swift, also known by his romantic rival Rowley Flint as “the Empire Builder”. He has known Mary since she was a teenager (fourteen, to be more exact) and will be promoted as the governor of Bengal, part of the then-occupied Indian subcontinent. In Mary’s view, he is “a man of consequence—certainly destined to hold positions of increasing importance” (8), and for a woman in a society where the marriage market still maintains a hold on women’s status, that is necessary. Mary’s mother is dead, and no other relatives are alive, besides a friend of the family Edgar, who she’s fond of. She rejects him because she wants to think over the proposal and also attend a dinner that her rich acquaintance Princess San Fernando is giving in town. Also, her past relationship was not the best, her husband was an alcoholic and gambler who died from an alcohol-induced car accident. Amid this relatively milquetoast event (rejected proposals are a dime a dozen in Somerset Maugham), Edgar gives us Chekov’s gun1— telling Mary to bring a gun with her because he has “the Englishman’s belief that foreigners on the whole were hazardous people.” (15).
At the party, Mary meets Rowley, who is a traditional rich ne’er do well—engaged many times to many women, divorced twice, unserious to the point of annoyance, and coasting off generational wealth. It is also implied that he had a flirtation with the Princess/is a favorite of her, as she asks Mary to take Rowley home in the car. On the way there, Rowley proposes and she rejects him instantly. What she wants, she prophetically states to Rowley, is to give a man pleasure (i.e. a fling) so he can have the opportunity of the finer things in life. Her opportunity comes true when she runs into the violin player who performed at the party, an undocumented Austrian refugee named Karl Richter. Richter was an art student who fled because of the Austrian Anschluss and his opposition to the Nazi regime. After being thrown in a concentration camp, he escapes to Italy, where he lives in a hovel owned by a friend of one of Mary’s servant friends. Mary does what she says she would to Rowley: gives Karl food, the pleasure of looking at Italian art, and, yes, sex.
It is only after they have sex that everything gets worse. While both parties enjoyed what happened, after Karl has seen so much beauty—” I have everything I have any right to hope for”—he wants to kill himself. Mary is adamantly against it and tells him her reason for taking him in—to give him happiness but not for a relationship—. Karl is understandably pissed off, calls her a whore, and rapes her. Then Mary remembers the pistol Edgar made her keep in her handbag. She threatens to kill him if he doesn’t leave. Then, she tries to sleep and then hears him kill himself. She decides to call Rowley, who bikes from the hotel to her house.
Rowley is very helpful: when she tells him what happened, he offers his help. Rowley helps move the body to a hill (and later, the revolver). He helps her create an alibi for what happened, and, in the process of burying Karl at the hill a group of Italians come in a car, he and she pretend they’re about to make out, which stops them from looking suspicious. The next day at a luncheon held by the Princess, she hears about speculation regarding Karl and her servant being mad about her friend not having another source of money: Mary can get through the luncheon without suspicion and gives her servant money to take to her friend. She then, against Rowley’s advice of “Empire builders” like Edgar “prizing integrity” (168), tells Edgar what happened when he comes to ask her to reply to his proposal. He treats her like an object, calling her “a romantic silly, thing” and saying that he should retire because of the effect of a scandal on his career. She hates this side and chooses to reject his proposal, also realizing that she could not be around him all the time if he does choose to retire and still marry her. Rowley then comes to check in on her as he sees Edgar leaving the hotel (they are staying at the same hotel) and re-proposes to her, as he has a plantation in Kenya that he wants to oversee. She accepts and his response is to what uncertainty can lie for them in Kenya “Darling, that’s what life’s to take risks.” (201). And that is the end of the novel.
Analysis
Amidst the ill-fated love affair between Karl and Mary, the important thing to look at here is who wins While he has the Maughamian (in particular, he reminds me a lot of his lover, Gerald Haxton) ne’er do well traits—drinks a lot, is a womanizer, a little too unserious, he ends up winning Mary’s hand. How he does so by mentioning to Mary that he has a plantation in Kenya where the overseer is mismanaging it. He wants to take a more active role in overseeing it as the person he’s hiring is running it poorly. However, Edgar, a colonial official and a high-ranking one at that, is rejected. This foreshadows the end of overt colonialism—the Empire Edgar works for will be dismantled after WW2 due to waves of decolonization. His valuing of integrity, but to a point when Mary tells her story, as well as his objectification of women, leads to his rejection. Rowley’s plantation represents a form of neo-colonialism: established during imperial rule but will be around as a symbol and continuance of the profits of exploitation of the Global South for the benefit of the Global North. It is a bit of a stretch to see aspects of a critique of empire—especially given the introduction to Volume 4 of his short story as defending the British Empire as a stabilizing force in the areas it conquered—, but Maugham is one to criticize hypocrisy in the state and society he lives in when he sees it. This also applies to aspects of his representation of women, which I see alongside Tennessee Williams as emphasizing patriarchal ties, or a lack thereof, while sympathizing with the plights men put them in.
Also, it is interesting to see Italy as a “safe space” despite its similarly colonial background and fascist leader. I’m assuming it is that for now as it is not actively pursuing enemies of the Reich (although that will change when the Nazis occupy Italy in 1943), but also because of the large British expat community there. Somerset Maugham did live in a French villa in the Rivera, which also had its expat community, but he also spent a long period in Italy, which brought about a novel (Then And Now, in 1946) and a handful of short stories. With that in mind, a lot of what Maugham characterizes with Karl is the tragedy of being exiled from his country and what he endured under Nazi rule. Not only is he put in a concentration camp, but his father, deprived of any legal rights by the Nazis, ends up committing suicide.
Well, that was a disaster for Mary, but a joy to read. Short, and the action happening almost instantly, which for readers of 19th and 20th-century books is like finding a needle in a haystack. I also read on a WordPress blog called Books and Boots (https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/04/21/up-at-the-villa-somerset-maugham/) that it is “the perfect introduction to Maugham for someone who has never read him.” and I think that that is a good assessment. While I started reading Maugham through just as excellent The Painted Veil, for those who are more interested in British expats behaving badly from authors such as Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, and, to a certain extent, Edith Wharton, it is an excellent recommendation. Happy reading(?)