The sequence of short stories by Somerset Maugham featuring a character named Ashenden was first published in the 1920s and is set in the previous decade, during the First World War. Ashenden is a writer of plays and novels who is recruited into British Intelligence by a colonel whom he knows only as “R”, who points out to him that as an author he has a plausible reason for living in Geneva, where he can gather intelligence from a network of informants who pass regularly in and out of Germany. When he is confronted by two detectives of the Swiss police, he tells them that he is in Geneva to write a play. The detectives know perfectly well that he is a spy — Ashenden is convinced that he must have been denounced — but they don’t have evidence that would justify his prosecution. (Neutral Switzerland couldn’t simply shoot him as a spy, and he tells one of his contacts, who is trying to pressure him to pay an additional 2,000 francs, that the maximum sentence to which he is liable is 2 years.) So long as Ashenden remains in neutral or friendly countries he is in no great danger, though R has impressed on him that if he succeeds in his mission he can expect no thanks and if he gets into trouble he can expect no help.

Ashenden describes wartime Geneva as “a hot-bed of intrigue” (p. 27). It’s possible that the capital of a neutral country may be a less congenial environment than that of one of the combatants.

There were Frenchmen there, Italians and Russians, Turks, Rumanians, Greeks and Egyptians. Some had fled their country, some doubtless represented it. (p. 28)

For his own amusement, he flirts with la Baronne de Higgins, an Austrian with Yorkshire antecedents, who is clearly working for the Germans, till R tells him to knock it off. He and a German agent with whom he had been acquainted in London before the war show no signs of recognizing each other.

Each of course knew on what work the other was engaged and Ashenden had had a mind to chaff him about it — it seemed absurd when he had dined with a man off and on for years and played cards with him, to act as though he did not know him from Adam — but refrained in case the German looked upon his behaviour as further proof of the British frivolity in face of war. (pp. 28–9)

Asheden, appropriately for a comic playwright, is a sardonic observer of human foibles, fairly tolerant and moderately courageous. On original publication, the stories were divided into 16 chapters, some more eventful and compelling than others. The edition that I have combines the original 16 into 6 stories (each about 35 to 40 pages); in his preface, the author mentions their “great length” (p. 7). This volume adds a seventh story, “Sanatorium”, which does not have a wartime setting but shows Ashenden recovering from tuberculosis in Scotland.

The consolidation of the stories omits one brief episode which appeared in the original publication, titled “The Flip of a Coin”. The omission is intersting and I’ll have a bit to say about it later in this post.

Much of Ashenden’s work involves aggregating small bits of information from various sources, incorporating them into a report and sending the report, in laboriously encoded form, up the line. He has been warned that he will often now know the results of his efforts if any. As it turns out, in the first two (consolidated) stories he is left in no doubt that nothing good comes of those efforts. The title character in “Miss King” is a disaffected Englishwoman, governess to the children of an exiled Egyptian prince (who are now old enough not to need a governess). She rebuffs Ashenden’s attempt to engage her in conversation and refuses to speak English. However, on her deathbed, she sends for him and apparently has something important to tell him but she’s unable to communicate because of a stroke and he never finds out what she had to say.

In the next story, “The Hairless Mexican”, Ashenden is sent to Naples (Italy was still neutral, so the story is set during the first year of the war) to oversee and eventually pay the title character, a flamboyant and eccentric self-styled “General”, whose mission is to intercept a man named Constantine Andreadi. The target is travelling from Piraeus to Brindisi with important information which he is to deliver to the German ambassador in Rome. The Mexican is to prevent the information, which is partly in the form of written dispatches and partly memorized by Andreadi, from getting through. Clearly, the only foolproof way to stop the unwritten communication is to kill the messenger, and R tells Ashenden that he doesn’t believe that the Mexican has a great respect for human life. However, R doesn’t tell Ashenden exactly what the General’s mission is.

“I don’t think you need bother your head about that.” (p. 48)

The Mexican intercepts the only Greek on the ship from Piraeus, and he and Ashenden search his hotel room but fail to find the papers. It turns out that Andreadi was prevented by illness from sailing, and Ashenden, who has been getting increasingly impatient with the Mexican’s antics, reveals that, R’s reticence notwithstanding, he fully understood what the General’s instructions were.

“You bloody fool, you’ve killed the wrong man.” (p. 80)

In the next two stories, Ashenden similarly plays an indirect role in the deaths of characters whose activities are inimical to British interests. Giulia Lazzari, the title character of the third story, is a dancer (“Popular Spanish music and a mantilla, a fan and a high comb”, p. 90) who has been doing some inconsequential spying for the Germans. As her name suggests, she is Italian, but her husband and passport, as well as her style of dancing, are Spanish. The British have captured her and want to use her to force her lover, Chandra Lal, to come to France where they can seize him too. Chandra Lal is a fighter for Indian independence who is now in Berlin and R considers him extremely dangerous and effective. When Ashenden asks what they intend to do to him, R replies that they will “shoot him damn quick” (p. 90).

Giulia Lazzari is threatened with a lengthy term in prison unless she contacts Chandra Lal and arranges to meet him in Switzerland. When he gets there, she is to write to him to say she is stuck in France and assure him that it’s safe for him to come to her there. Afraid of prison, she cooperates reluctantly and up to a point, but tries to warn her lover to stay in Switzerland. When, eventually, he crosses into France, he kills himself with poison as soon as he realizes it’s a trap. The dancer tells Ashenden:

“He always carried it with him. He said that the English should never take him alive.” (p. 117)

In “The Traitor”, which is one of the longest stories and, as the fourth of seven, occupies the central position in the volume, Ashenden is in Lucerne to find Grantley Caypor, an Englishman who is spying for the Germans. Caypor is married to a German woman and says that he has chosen to live out the war in a neutral country as she would find it intolerable to live in England while the conflict continues. Ashenden’s cover is that he works for the Censorship Department, and Caypor, under pressure from his German paymasters to gather more intelligence, sees an opportunity. With a letter of recommendation from Ashenden to the latter’s supposed employer, Caypor goes home to England where (or so Ashenden interprets the cryptic acknowledgement from R) he is summarily shot. Ashenden, still in Lucerne, witnesses the mounting distress of Frau Caypor and their dog when no news arrives from England.

Caypor’s fate contrasts with that of an agent codenamed Gustav, who is based in Basle. Gustav has been the commercial representative of a Swiss company which has business interests in Germany, and so is understood to have many opportunities for intelligence-gathering. His reports are treated as models of what R requires from his agents. However, R becomes suspicious and Ashenden discovers that the well paid Gustav no longer travels to Germany at all and that his reports, rather like those in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, are pure invention. Ashenden seems unperturbed by the deception and merely tells Gustav that the British will no longer pay his salary. He suggests that, instead, Gustav should take up the same role with the Germans, passing on to them misleading information provided by the British, who would also be prepared to pay an irregular bonus for valuable information, provided it was verified. Both parties seemed content with this arrangement.

The fifth story, “His Excellency”, seems to be set in immediately prerevolutionry Russia, though the country is named only as “X”. Ashenden is there on a mission about which the British and US ambassadors have largely been kept in the dark. The British ambassador, Sir Herbert Witherspoon, is formal and rather stiff and Ashenden has the sense that both ambassadors are put out at having been instructed to dispatch Ashenden’s coded telegrams without knowing what’s in them. He is surprised, then, when Sir Herbert invites him to dinner, and even more so when he finds that he is the only guest. They discuss Byring, the current ambassador to France, who intends to leave the diplomatic service so as to marry a beautiful and charming courtesan, who appears to love him as much as he does her. At any rate, the prospect of his abandoning a career for which he is excellently suited, and the income that goes with it, doesn’t perturb her.

Ashenden thinks that Byring, whom he admires, is “a damned fool” (p. 166), but the ambassador tells him a long, sad story about a friend of his, whom he calls “Brown”, who found himself in a similar position to Byring’s and made the opposite choice, giving up the woman he was obsessed with and going on to marry someone more suited to being a dipolmat’s wife, leading to to a life of quiet domestic misery. It clear almost immediately that the ambassador is telling his own story and Ashenden is acutely embarrassed, wishing that he would stop. This is the first indication that we have, I think, that Ashenden, who has often in the previous stories seemed a rather permissive, live-and-let-live character, also has a conventional side. He feels that Byring should put his hitherto stellar career first, and that Sir Herbert, having made his eminently defensible choice, ought to maintain a stiff upper lip.

In the next story, made up of the last three chapters in the original publication, we see some more of this aspect of Ashenden. “Mr Harrington’s Washing” is expressly set in Russia, just at the beginning of the Bolshevik revolution. Ashenden is on a demanding and ambitious mission which depends on Kerensky’s government staying in power for at least another three months. Essentially, his job is to make sure that Russia stays in the war against the Germans. In this he is is assisted by, among various others, Anastasia Alexandrovna Leonidov, a woman with whom he was deeply involved in London five years ealier (that’s to say in 1912, two years before the start of the war).

They had wanted to get married but what was to be done about Anastasia Alexandrovna’s husband?

“Vladimir would never expose me to the vulgar notoriety of the divorce court. When I tell him that I have decided to marry you he will commit suicide.” (p. 208)

Ashenden’s reaction to this confident assertion was to be “startled, but thrilled” (p. 208). It was like being in a Russian novel. “These Russians, what fun they have!” (p. 209). Given the terrible potential consequences for Vladimir Semenovich, they had to be absolutely sure they were doing the right thing before telling him about their plans. Anastasia Alexandrovna suggested that they spend a week in Paris together, so that they would know for sure.

Ashenden was a trifle conventional and the suggestion took him by surprise. But only for a moment. Anastasia was wonderful. She was very quick and she saw the hesitation that for an instant troubled him.

“Surely you have no bourgeois prejudices?” she said.

“Of course not,” he assured her hurriedly, for he would much sooner have been thought knavish than bourgeois, “I think it’s a splendid idea.” (p. 209)

But in Paris, she not only ate scrambled eggs for breakfast every morning but insisted that he do the same: it would be “inconsiderate” (p. 212) to give the cook the unnecessary work of frying eggs for him as well as scrambling hers. When they got back to London after the week away, he immediately booked a berth to New York, and didn’t see Anastasia Alexandrovna again till five years later in Petrograd. He is relieved to see that she does not seem angry with him and shows no sign of having pined for him during the intervening years.

It seems possible that her eccentric breakfast habits, as well as her alarming prediction of Vladimir Semenovich’s suicide, were calculated to push Ashenden away without her dumping him outright. If so, it’s striking that the scrambled eggs were much more effective at putting him off than the prospect of her husband’s doing away with himself.

The final story, “Sanatorium”, is set after the war has ended. Ashenden is expected to recover from tuberculosis and he observes the behaviour of a varied group of fellow patients who react in different ways to the possibility (and in some cases near certainty) of early death.

Ashenden continued to read, and with amused tolerance to watch the vagaries of his fellow-creatures. (p. 241)

After a conversation with Mrs Chester, the wife of a man who was used to being healthy and resents his disease as a nasty, undeserved trick, he reflects:

People often said he had a low opinion of human nature. It was because he did not always judge his fellows by the usual standards. He accepted with a smile, a tear, or a shrug of the shoulders, much that filled others with dismay. (p. 239)

The omitted episode, “The Flip of a Coin”, is concerned with events that unfold just before those of “His Excellency”. Ashenden approaches R with a proposition which has come through one of his agents and about which he himself is noncommittal. A subject of King B, the ruler of one of the Balkan states, is offering to assassinate the king in return for £5,000. The king intends to bring his country into the war on the German side, so his assassination would probably benefit the allies. R rebuffs the offer: their side does not wage war by those means. “Damn it all, we are gentlemen.” He reproaches Ashenden for bringing the proposal to him, while at the same time intimating that if the would-be assassin were to go ahead with the scheme of his own accord, the allies would be glad to take advantage of the resulting situation. It takes Ashenden a moment to catch on.

“Don’t think I’m going to pay the fellow five thousand pounds out of my own pocket. Not a chance.”

On first reading I thought it was a mistake to leave out this episode, in that it makes clear to the reader R’s deviousness and the nature of his “principles”. On reflection, I realized that such a revelation is perhaps a bit too on-the-nose and that it was best after all to leave a certain anmbiguity about R’s character and methods.

Edition: W Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories volume 3, Penguin 1963, reprint 1974.