I have a bit of a weakness for spy stories, and over the course of the last 12 months, have worked my way through The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (1907); The Chinese Carnation by Louis Weinert-Wilton (1936); Spy Hook by Len Deighton (1988); Secret Asset by Stella Rimington (2006); and A Legacy of Spies by John le Carre (2017).

I'm a little late coming to the formative Ashenden, by W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). Published in 1928, it has one of those wonderful alternative titles that used to be customary. Ashenden: Or the British Agent...

As Andrew Meier says, this is where spy aficionados should begin: "'I suppose,' le Carré has said, conceding a rare measure of influence, 'that Maugham was the first person to write about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality.' In Alec Leamas, the spy made famous for leaving the cold, there is much of Maugham’s secret agent." Eric Ambler also credits Ashenden as an influence.

Maugham was possibly the first spinner of espionage tales who had actually been a spy... As he says in the Preface: "This book is founded on my experiences in the Intelligence Department during the war, but rearranged for the purposes of fiction." He also warns us that such employment "is on the whole extremely monotonous", and to a large extent "uncommonly useless". But he did, for example, go to Russia in 1917 (as does Ashenden): "I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success."

The need to rearrange things, including espionage, for the purposes of fiction also offers the opportunity for a swipe at the modernists: "Fact is a poor story-teller. It starts a story at haphazard, generally long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequently and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion. It works up to an interesting situation, and then leaves it in the air to follow an issue that has nothing to do with the point; it has no sense of climax and whittles away its dramatic effects in irrelevance. There is a school of novelists that looks upon this as the proper model for fiction. If life, they say, is arbitrary and disconnected, why, fiction should be so too; for fiction should imitate life... They do not give you a story, they give you the material on which you can invent your own... There is in fact a second theory that is just as plausible, and this is that fiction should use life merely as raw material which it arranges in ingenious patterns."

Fiction, in other words, is life with a point...

Like Ashenden, Maugham installed himself in Geneva, and used his writing career as a cover. He subsequently wrote a number of stories about his experiences, but on being warned that some of them contravened the Official Secrets Act, he consigned a significant proportion to a fiery end. (Maugham wasn't the only writer to be hired as an agent. There's an interesting discussion about the wisdom of such an arrangement here.)


Geneva, 2023

What remains is a very readable piece. It's not exactly a novel, more a series of interconnected stories. The episodes are by turns moving, gripping, and funny.

The first chapter describes how Ashenden is recruited by the cold, calculating R., who tells his new man: "If you do well you'll get no thanks and if you get into trouble you'll get no help." R. is supremely aloof. Omniscient, ruthless, and clinical, his one humanizing feature is his social vulnerability: "It amused Ashenden to see R., so sharp, sure of himself and alert in his office, seized as he walked into the restaurant with shyness. He talked a little too loud in order to show that he was at his ease and made himself somewhat unnecessarily at home. You saw in his manner the shabby and commonplace life he had led till the hazards of war raised him to a position of consequence." Ah, the British, the British...

Ashenden's character is phlegmatic. He generally remains detached, and regards dramatic incidents and oddball characters with the eye of a collector. He's shy. He worries about missing trains. He loves his baths. And much of his work is indeed routine. He runs agents; parries others in the same business as himself (neutral Switzerland is a hotbed of spies, revolutionaries, and agitators); travels fairly extensively; "minds" those at the sharp end of the business; codes and decodes messages; and writes reports. "Being no more than a tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine, he never had the advantage of seeing a completed action. He was concerned with the beginning or the end of it, perhaps, or with some incident in the middle, but what his own doings led to he had seldom a chance of discovering. It was as unsatisfactory as those modern novels that give you a number of unrelated episodes and expect you by piecing them together to construct in your mind a connected narrative."

The various chapters see Ashenden confronting a mysterious deathbed message, a Mexican hard man who manages to kill the wrong person, an Indian freedom-fighter for whom he has much sympathy (yet can do nothing), an agent who makes stuff up, a Briton who is working for the Germans, and a decision on whether or not to blow up a munitions factory in Austria. Maugham cleverly leaves a few of these up in the air. We never fathom the governess's dying word ("England"); and we don't know which way the sabotage decision goes (only that it is made by the toss of a coin, which is as good a way as any, I think, when no clear course recommends itself).



There are a couple of outlier chapters: The confessions of Sir Herbert Witherspoon (a British ambassador who feels he has wasted his life because he didn't follow his heart and run away with a completely unsuitable woman) didn't work so well, I felt. But the journey from Vladivostock to Petrograd with the incorrigible chatterbox John Quincy Harrington had me writhing in sympathy for Ashenden. And Chapter 15, Love and Russian Literature, is a hilarious send-up of the vogue for all things Russian that apparently swept Europe in the early part of the 20th century. In Ashenden's case, this enthusiasm includes falling in love with Anastasia Alexandrovna, and it's really worth quoting a whole chunk:

"In her dark melancholy eyes Ashenden saw the boundless steppes of Russia, and the Kremlin with its pealing bells, and the solemn ceremonies of Easter at St. Isaac's, and forests of silver beeches and the Nevsky Prospekt; it was astonishing how much he saw in her eyes."

When he suggests she divorce her husband, and marry him, she calmly announces that her husband would then kill himself:

"'That would be terrible,' said Ashenden.
"He was startled, but thrilled. It was really very much like a Russian novel and he saw the moving and terrible pages, pages and pages, in which Dostoievsky would have described the situation. He knew the lacerations his characters would have suffered, the broken bottles of champagne, the visits to the gipsies, the vodka, the swoonings, the catalepsy and the long, long speeches everyone would have made. It was all very dreadful and wonderful and shattering."

When the two would-be soul-mates have a trial period together in Paris, however, Ashenden quickly learns that his beloved is a trial in more ways than one. If he orders, for example, anything other than scrambled eggs for breakfast, she takes it as a sign that he is a selfish bourgeois, co-responsible for the outbreak of revolution...

"'Do you really think that there'll be a revolution in England if I have my eggs in Paris fried rather than scrambled?'
"She tossed her pretty head in indignation.
"'You don't understand. It's the principle of the thing... Your whole attitude is wrong. It's a lack of feeling. You wouldn't talk like that if you had been through the events of 1905 in Petersburg. When I think of the crowds in front of the Winter Palace kneeling in the snow while the Cossacks charged them, women and children! No, no, no.'"

As soon as he can, he takes ship for America... Later he realizes "that he had not loved her, but Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Stravinsky and Bakst".

Still, Anastasia Alexandrovna does her best to look after John Quincy Harrington in Petrograd in November 1917, when the Bolshevik revolution brings Lenin and Trotzky to power. In what is actually a fairly believable melange of the mundane and the tragic, Harrington dies trying to collect his laundry...



In all, the book is a reminder of how well Maugham writes. I read many of his books in my younger days (Then and Now; Cakes and Ale; The Merry-Go-Round; Theatre; Mrs Craddock; The Moon and Sixpence; some of the short stories). Years later, when I picked him up again, though, I drew a couple of blanks (I didn't like The Razor's Edge; and found the film version of The Painted Veil unsatisfactory). It was The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng, that got me interested again. And Ashenden is a clear green signal.

There's that haunting account of the blind soldier at the railway station in Russia; the description of the joys of the sleeping car; the atmospheric evocation of Lac Leman on a stormy day, or Lucerne when all the holiday-makers have been spirited away by the war; the recollection of witnessing a firing squad (haunting lines rivalling Hemingway's powerful account in In Our Time...)

Some of the politics is terribly resonant even now. There's a nice description, for example, of an American ambassador who is a political appointee: "He had already made up his mind from the look of him that Mr. Schaefer, though doubtless possessed of the gifts that enable a man to swing a presidential election this way or that, had not, at least nakedly for all men to see, the acuteness that his position perhaps demanded... He looked upon the eminence to which he had risen as an opportunity to enjoy the good things of life and his enthusiasm led him to lengths that his constitution could ill support. His ignorance of foreign affairs would in any case have made his judgment of doubtful value, but his state at meetings of the allied ambassadors so often approached the comatose that he seemed hardly capable of forming a judgment at all."

The desire of the upper echelons not to be caught red-handed has persisted as well. They want dirty deeds to go ahead, but they don't want accountability: "They were willing to take advantage of an accomplished fact, but wanted to shift on to someone else the responsibility of bringing it about." Plus ca change...

All in all, elegant, atmospheric, and highly readable.