Book review: “Ashenden: Or the British Agent” by W. Somerset Maugham

Ashenden, somewhat celebrated as an author, is serving as a secret British agent in Switzerland during the Great War, only later known as World War I.

He is, truly, a secret agent, but that term is likely to suggest that he’s a rip-roaring, bed-hopping, master of physical violence and deering-do like Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Which he isn’t.

Indeed, at the start of “The Greek,” one of the sixteen stories that make up W. Somerset Maugham’s 1927 book Ashenden: Or the British Agent, he’s been sent to Naples where, for a few days, he leads an idle life suitable for such a genial city.

He did nothing from morning till night but wander at random, looking, not with the eye of the tourist who seeks for what ought to be seen, nor with the eye of the writer who looks for his own (seeing in a sunset a melodious phrase or in a face the inkling of a character), but with that of the tramp to whom whatever happens is absolute…

But he always came back to the church of Santa Chiara. Its grace, its gaiety, the airy persiflage with which it seemed to treat religion and at the back of this its sensual emotion; its extravagance, its elegance of line; to Ashenden it seemed to express, as it were in one absurd and grandiloquent metaphor, the sunny, dusty, lovely city and its bustling inhabitants.

It said that life was charming and sad; it’s a pity one hadn’t any money, but money wasn’t everything, and anyway why bother when we are here to-day and gone to-morrow, and it was all very exciting and amusing, and after all we must make the best of things: facciamo una piccola combinazione.

Which is, in English, “Let’s make a little deal.”

 

“MASTERFUL SPY THRILLER”

It’s been nearly a century since Maugham’s collection was first published, and, it appears, the book has never gone out of print. In addition to several English editions now available, French, Danish, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese and German versions can easily be found online.

The Ashenden I read was a 60-cent mass market paperback, published in 1966, with a post-World War II preface from Maugham.

The cover is very 1960s, featuring a come-hither blond showing a lot of skin, a giant revolver and, in the trigger circle, an elegant, cigarette-smoking James Bond-ish tuxedoed gentleman, giving the bad guy (or the reader?) the eye.

“MASTERFUL SPY THRILLER” is what the cover copy promises, but Ashenden is nothing like what a reader from the 60s looked for in a thriller after more than a decade of Ian Fleming books. Nor would it fit the expectations of a twenty-first century reader, used to the heart-pounding, fast-paced movies of franchises such as Mission: Impossible and Jason Bourne.

The fact of the matter is that Ashenden isn’t a thriller at all. What it is, is literature.

 

“Uncommonly useless”

Which is to be expected, inasmuch as, in the course of a 67-year writing career (during a 91-year life), Maugham published 20 novels, 13 short-story collections, 25 plays and 15 non-fiction works, many of them highly acclaimed.

Indeed, in 1914 at the start of World War I, Maugham was already a famous author with eight novels and 13 plays to his credit. In his early forties, Maugham was too old to serve as a soldier, but, for a year, he worked under cover for British Intelligence while living in Switzerland with his future wife and their daughter.

Ashenden is a similarly well-known writer although, unlike Maugham, he is living single while pursuing his spycraft.  And, unlike James Bond, the life of a secret agent for Ashenden isn’t a thrill a minute. As Maugham writes in the preface of my paperback edition:

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.

 

“A poor storyteller”

The element of the mundaneness of the spy business which pervades Ashenden is echoed in a certain strain of secret agent novelists who followed Maugham, such as John le Carre, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.

Maugham notes in the preface of my edition, “Fact is a poor storyteller…It has no sense of climax and whittles away its dramatic effects in irrelevance.”

Still, in mining his experiences as a spy for his fictional stories, Maugham didn’t aim to create an overarching plot such as is found in the spy novels of le Carre and the others. Instead, he offers a collection of loosely connected pieces, centering on Ashenden and his experiences.  Each story is a standalone tale although the sixteen can be combined, as some editions do without any rewriting, into six somewhat heftier narratives.

 

The Hairless Mexican

Maugham doesn’t employ the spy setting for excitement or adventure. He uses it as, throughout his career, he had used other settings from his own experience to think about and look at what makes humans tick — and how the windings of life can result in almost anything: humor, boredom, grotesqueness, surprise, tragedy.

Consider Ashenden’s description of the man he calls the Hairless Mexican:

The Hairless Mexican was a tall man, and though thinnish gave you the impression of being very powerful; he was smartly dressed in a blue serge suit, with a silk handkerchief neatly tucked in the breast pocket of his coat, and he wore a gold bracelet on his wrist. His features were good, but a little larger than life-size, and his eyes were brown and lustrous.

He was quite hairless. His yellow skin had the smoothness of a woman’s and he had no eyebrows nor eyelashes; he wore a pale brown wig, rather long, and the locks were arranged in artistic disorder. This and the unwrinkled sallow face, combined with his dandified dress, gave him an appearance that was at first glance a trifle horrifying.

He was repulsive and ridiculous, but you could not take your eyes from him. There was a sinister fascination in his strangeness.

It’s anyone’s guess whether Maugham crossed paths with someone like this during his spy career.  What’s certain is that his interest here is not in the details of being a secret agent but in the details of humanity.

The readers of genre thrillers wouldn’t expect to have a character described with such literate specificity and might complain that all the wordiness was slowing down the story.

 

A coin

In addition to such descriptions, Ashenden also features moments of what might best be called philosophy:

Ashenden thought on a sudden of those sharp-pointed stars on which for a moment his eyes had rested as he walked through the frosty night. It seemed an age since he had sat in the spacious dining-room at the embassy and listened to Sir Herbert Witherspoon’s story of his successful, wasted life. Mr. Schäfer’s susceptibilities and his own small intrigues, the love of Byring and Rose Auburn: how unimportant; Man, with so short a time between the cradle and the grave, spent his life in foolishness. A trivial creature! The bright stars shone in the cloudless sky.

“Man…spent his life in foolishness.” It is as if Maugham were channeling the Book of Ecclesiastes.

This thought comes to him near the end of a conversation with another agent over whether a bomb should be set off, resulting in the deaths of many innocent people.

And how trivial, how foolish, are humans?  The two men can’t decide.

So, they flip a coin.

 

“Laughed outright”

In this way, the high seriousness of intelligence-gathering, so honored by the writers of spy novels, is reduced to such an everyday human level. How often have you or I or people we know chosen this banal expediency to answer an ambiguous question? Should I go to the grocery store?  Should we set off the bomb.

Another very human moment that puts spying in its place firmly within the scope of routine human endeavor comes when Ashenden shows up at the home of Gustav, one of his agents — the one supplying the most complete, well-organized and well-composed reports — who seems too good to be true.  Which is right.

In a conversation, Ashenden decides to try a bluff, a maneuver that secret agents are sometimes wont to employ in the genre novels but also one that regular people use all the time. He suggests to Gustav that all of his reports are the products only of his imagination.

Gustav looked at Ashenden and saw a face expressive of nothing but tolerance and good humor. A smile slowly broke on his lips and he gave his shoulders a little shrug.

“Did you think I was such a fool as to risk my life for fifty pounds a month? I love my wife.”

Ashenden laughed outright.

“I congratulate you. It is not everyone who can flatter himself that he has made a fool of our secret service for a year.”

“I had the chance of earning money without any difficulty. My firm stopped sending me into Germany at the beginning of the war, but I learned what I could from the other travellers. I kept my ears open in restaurants and beer-cellars, and I read the German papers. I got a lot of amusement out of sending you reports and letters.”

“I don’t wonder,” said Ashenden.

Gustav has made a mockery of his British handlers, including Ashenden, but, well, that’s life.

“We part without ill-feeling then?” he asked.

“Of course. Your reports will remain in our archives as models of what a report should be.”

Human life — and spying — is nothing if not absurd.

 

An innocent fool

Even so, these are spy stories, and sometimes agents pay the price of doing dangerous work.  At others, innocent people do.

John Quincy Harrington, an American businessman who is in Russia during the war to get a contract signed, is innocent — but he’s also a fool.

He’s taking a long train ride with Ashenden to St. Petersburg, sharing a sleeper compartment, and, to provide a thread of humor, Maugham plays up Harrington’s witless self-absorption and non-stop, mindless commentary at Ashenden’s expense:

Mr. Harrington was a bore. He exasperated Ashenden, and enraged him; he got on his nerves, and drove him to frenzy. But Ashenden did not dislike him. His self-satisfaction was enormous but so ingenuous that you could not resent it; his conceit was so childlike that you could only smile at it.

He was so well-meaning, so thoughtful, so deferential, so polite that though Ashenden would willingly have killed him he could not but own that in that short while he had conceived for Mr. Harrington something very like affection. His manners were exquisite, formal, a trifle elaborate perhaps (there is no harm in that, for good manners are the product of an artificial state of society and so can bear a touch of the powdered wig and the lace ruffle), but though natural to his good breeding they gained a pleasant significance from his good heart…He did everything in the world for him but stop talking.

Like Ashenden, the reader is alternately annoyed by Harrington’s personality quirks and attracted to such a true doofus.

But his innocence is no protection in a time of war and violence.

And, in the end, what made Harrington so funny is what makes him so tragic.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.28.26