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William Somerset Maugham, CH
(January 25, 1874 – December
16, 1965) was an English
playwright, novelist, and
theatre writer. He was one of
the most popular authors of his
era, and reputedly the highest
paid of his profession during
the 1930s.
 Childhood
and
education
Maugham's
father was an English
lawyer handling the legal
affairs of the British
embassy in Paris. Since
French law declared that
all children born on
French soil could be
conscripted for military
service, Robert Ormond
Maugham arranged for
William to be born at the
embassy, technically on
British soil, saving him
from conscription into any
future French wars. His
grandfather, another
Robert, had also been a
prominent lawyer and
cofounder of the English
Law Society, and it was
taken for granted that
William would follow in
their footsteps. Events
were to ensure this was
not to be, but his older
brother Frederic Herbert
Maugham did enjoy a
distinguished legal
career, becoming Lord
Chancellor between
1938–9.
Maugham's mother Edith Mary
(née Snell) was consumptive, a
condition for which the doctors
of the time prescribed
childbirth. As a result Maugham
had three older brothers,
already enrolled in boarding
school by the time he was three
and Maugham was effectively
raised as an only child. Sadly,
childbirth proved no cure for
tuberculosis, and Edith Mary
Maugham died at the age of 41,
six days after the stillbirth
of her final son. The death of
his mother left Maugham
traumatized for life, and he
kept his mother's photograph by
his bedside until his own death
at the age of 91 in Nice,
France.
Two years after his mother's
death, Maugham's father died of
cancer. Willie was sent back to
England to be cared for by his
uncle, Henry MacDonald Maugham,
the Vicar of Whitstable, in
Kent. The move was
catastrophic. Henry Maugham
proved cold and emotionally
cruel. The King's School,
Canterbury, where Willie was a
boarder during school terms,
proved merely another version
of purgatory, where he was
teased for his bad English
(French had been his first
language) and his short
stature, which he inherited
from his father.
It is at this time that Maugham
developed the stammer that
would stay with him all his
life, although it was sporadic
and subject to mood and
circumstance.
Life at the vicarage was tame,
and emotions were tightly
circumscribed. Maugham was
forbidden to lose his temper,
or to make emotional displays
of any kind — and he was denied
the chance to see others
express their own emotions. He
was a quiet, private but very
curious child, and this denial
of the emotion of others was at
least as hard on him as the
denial of his own emotions.
The upshot was that Maugham was
miserable, both at the vicarage
and at school, where he was
bullied because of his small
size and his stammer. As a
result, he developed a talent
for applying a wounding remark
to those who displeased him.
This ability is sometimes
reflected in the characters
that populate his writings.
At sixteen, Maugham refused to
continue at The King's School
and his uncle allowed him to
travel to Germany, where he
studied literature, philosophy
and German at Heidelberg
University. It was during his
year in Heidelberg that he met
John Ellingham Brooks, an
Englishman ten years his
senior, and with whom he had
his first sexual
experience.
On his return to England his
uncle found Maugham a position
in an accountant's office, but
after a month Maugham gave it
up and returned to Whitstable.
His uncle was not pleased, and
set about finding Maugham a new
profession. Maugham's father
and three older brothers were
all distinguished lawyers and
Maugham asked to be excused
from the duty of following in
their footsteps.
A career in the church was
rejected because a stammering
minister might make the family
seem ridiculous. Likewise, the
civil service was rejected —
not out of consideration for
Maugham's own feelings or
interests, but because the
recent law requiring civil
servants to qualify by passing
an examination made Maugham's
uncle conclude that the civil
service was no longer a career
for gentlemen.
The local doctor suggested the
profession of medicine and
Maugham's uncle reluctantly
approved this. Maugham had been
writing steadily since the age
of 15 and fervently intended to
become an author, but because
Maugham was not of age, he
could not confess this to his
guardian. So he spent the next
five years as a medical student
in London.
Early
works
Many readers and some critics
have assumed that the years
Maugham spent studying medicine
were a creative dead end, but
Maugham himself felt quite the
contrary. He was able to live
in the lively city of London,
to meet people of a "low" sort
that he would never have met in
one of the other professions,
and to see them in a time of
heightened anxiety and meaning
in their lives. In maturity, he
recalled the literary value of
what he saw as a medical
student: "I saw how men died. I
saw how they bore pain. I saw
what hope looked like, fear and
relief..." Maugham saw how
corrosive to human values
suffering was, how bitter and
hostile sickness made people,
and never forgot it. Here,
finally, was "life in the raw"
and the chance to observe a
range of human emotions.
Maugham kept his own lodgings,
took pleasure in furnishing
them, filled many notebooks
with literary ideas, and
continued writing nightly while
at the same time studying for
his degree in medicine. In
1897, he presented his second
book for consideration. (The
first was a biography of
Meyerbeer written by the
16-year-old Maugham in
Heidelberg.)
Liza of Lambeth, a tale of
working-class adultery and its
consequences, drew its details
from Maugham's experiences as a
medical student doing midwifery
work in the London slum of
Lambeth. The novel is of the
school of social-realist "slum
writers" such as George Gissing
and Arthur Morrison. Frank as
it is, Maugham still felt
obliged to write near the
opening of the novel: "...it is
impossible always to give the
exact unexpurgated words of
Liza and the other personages
of the story; the reader is
therefore entreated with his
thoughts to piece out the
necessary imperfections of the
dialogue."
Liza of Lambeth proved popular
with both reviewers and the
public, and the first print run
sold out in a matter of weeks.
This was enough to convince
Maugham, who had qualified as a
doctor, to drop medicine and
embark on his sixty-five year
career as a man of letters. Of
his entry into the profession
of writing he later said, "I
took to it as a duck takes to
water."
The writer's life allowed
Maugham to travel and live in
places such as Spain and Capri
for the next decade, but his
next ten works never came close
to rivalling the success of
Liza. This changed dramatically
in 1907 with the phenomenal
success of his play Lady
Frederick; by the next year he
had four plays running
simultaneously in London, and
Punch published a cartoon of
Shakespeare biting his
fingernails nervously as he
looked at the billboards.
Popular
success,
1914–1939
By 1914 Maugham was famous,
with 10 plays produced and 10
published novels. Too old to
enlist when World War I broke
out, Maugham served in France
as a member of the British Red
Cross's so-called "Literary
Ambulance Drivers", a group of
some 23 well-known writers
including Ernest Hemingway,
John Dos Passos, and E. E.
Cummings. During this time he
met Frederick Gerald Haxton, a
young San Franciscan who became
his companion and lover until
Haxton's death in 1944 (Haxton
appears as Tony Paxton in
Maugham's 1917 play, Our
Betters). Throughout this
period Maugham continued to
write; indeed, he proof-read Of
Human Bondage at a location
near Dunkirk during a lull in
his ambulance duties.
Of Human Bondage (1915)
initially received adverse
criticism both in England and
America, with the New York
World describing the subject of
the main protagonist Philip
Carey as the sentimental
servitude of a poor fool.
However the influential critic,
and novelist, Theodore Dreiser
rescued the novel referring to
it as a work of genius, and
comparing it to a Beethoven
symphony. This criticism gave
the book the lift it needed and
it has since never been out of
print.
The book appeared to be closely
autobiographical (Maugham's
stammer is transformed into
Philip Carey's club foot, the
vicar of Whitstable becomes the
vicar of Blackstable, and
Philip Carey is a doctor)
although Maugham himself
insisted it was more invention
than fact. Nevertheless, the
close relationship between
fictional and non-fictional
became Maugham's trademark,
despite the legal requirement
to state that "the characters
in are entirely imaginary". In
1938 he wrote: "Fact and
fiction are so intermingled in
my work that now, looking back
on it, I can hardly distinguish
one from the other."
Although Maugham's first and
many other sexual relationships
were with men, he also had
sexual relationships with a
number of women. Specifically
his affair with Syrie Wellcome,
daughter of orphanage founder
Thomas John Barnardo and wife
of American-born English
pharmaceutical magnate Henry
Wellcome, produced a daughter
named Liza (born Mary Elizabeth
Wellcome, 1915–1998). Henry
Wellcome then sued his wife for
divorce, naming Maugham as
co-respondent. In May 1917,
following the decree nisi,
Syrie and Maugham were married.
Syrie became a noted interior
decorator who popularized the
all-white room in the
1920s.
Maugham returned to England
from his ambulance unit duties
to promote Of Human Bondage but
once that was finalised, he
became eager to assist the war
effort once more. As he was
unable to return to his
ambulance unit, Syrie arranged
for him to be introduced to a
high ranking intelligence
officer known only as "R", and
in September 1915 he began work
in Switzerland, secretly
gathering and passing on
intelligence while posing as
himself — that is, as a
writer.
In 1916, Maugham travelled to
the Pacific to research his
novel The Moon And Sixpence,
based on the life of Paul
Gauguin. This was the first of
those journeys through the
late-Imperial world of the
1920s and 1930s which were to
establish Maugham forever in
the popular imagination as the
chronicler of the last days of
colonialism in India, Southeast
Asia, China and the Pacific,
although the books on which
this reputation rests represent
only a fraction of his output.
On this and all subsequent
journeys he was accompanied by
Haxton, whom he regarded as
indispensable to his success as
a writer. Maugham himself was
painfully shy, and Haxton the
extrovert gathered human
material that Maugham steadily
turned into fiction.
In June, 1917 he was asked by
Sir William Wiseman, chief of
the British Secret Intelligence
Service (later named MI6), to
undertake a special mission in
Russia to keep the Provisional
Government in power and Russia
in the war by countering German
pacifist propaganda. Two and a
half months later the
Bolsheviks took control. The
job was probably always
impossible, but Maugham
subsequently claimed that if he
had been able to get there six
months earlier, he might have
succeeded.
Quiet and observant, Maugham
had a good temperament for
intelligence work; he believed
he had inherited from his
lawyer father a gift for cool
judgement and the ability to be
undeceived by facile
appearances.
Never losing the chance to turn
real life into a story, Maugham
made his spying experiences
into a collection of short
stories about a gentlemanly,
sophisticated, aloof spy,
Ashenden, a volume that
influenced the Ian Fleming
James Bond series.
In 1922 Maugham dedicated On A
Chinese Screen, a book of 58
ultra-short story sketches
collected during his 1920
travels through China and Hong
Kong, to Syrie, with the
intention of later turning the
sketches into a book.
Dramatised from a story which
first appeared in his
collection The Casuarina Tree
published in 1924, Maugham's
play The Letter, starring
Gladys Cooper, had its premiere
in London in 1927. The play was
later turned into a film in
1929 and again in 1940.
Syrie and Maugham divorced in
1927–8 after a tempestuous
marriage complicated by
Maugham's frequent travels
abroad and strained by his
relationship with Haxton.
In 1928, Maugham bought Villa
Mauresque on twelve acres at
Cap Ferrat on the French
Riviera, which would be his
home for most of the rest of
his life, and one of the great
literary and social salons of
the 1920s and 30s. His output
continued to be prodigious,
including plays, short stories,
novels, essays and travel
books. By 1940, when the
collapse of France forced
Maugham to leave the French
Riviera and become a
well-heeled refugee, he was
already one of the most famous
writers in the English-speaking
world, and one of the
wealthiest.
Grand
Old Man of
letters
Maugham, by now in his sixties,
spent most of World War II in
the United States, first in
Hollywood (he worked on many
scripts, and was one of the
first authors to make
significant money from film
adaptations) and later in the
South. While in the US he was
asked by the British government
to make patriotic speeches to
induce the US to aid Britain,
if not necessarily become an
allied combatant. Gerald Haxton
died in 1944, and Maugham moved
back to England, then in 1946
to his villa in France, where
he lived, interrupted by
frequent and long travels,
until his death.
The gap left by Haxton's death
in 1944 was filled by Alan
Searle. Maugham had first met
Searle in 1928. Searle was a
young man from the London slum
area of Bermondsey and he had
already been kept by older men.
He proved a devoted if not a
stimulating companion. Indeed
one of Maugham's friends,
describing the difference
between Searle and Haxton, said
simply: "Gerald was vintage,
Alan was vin ordinaire."
Maugham's love life was almost
never smooth. He once
confessed: "I have most loved
people who cared little or
nothing for me and when people
have loved me I have been
embarrassed... In order not to
hurt their feelings, I have
often acted a passion I did not
feel."
A bitter attack on the deceased
Syrie in his 1962 volume of
memoirs, Looking Back lost him
several friends. In his last
years Maugham adopted Searle as
his son in order to ensure that
he would inherit his estate, a
move hotly contested by his
daughter Liza and her husband,
Lord Glendevon, and which
exposed Maugham to much public
ridicule.
There is no grave for Maugham,
his ashes were scattered near
the Maugham Library, King's
School, Canterbury.
Achievements
Commercial success with high
book sales, successful play
productions and a string of
film adaptations, backed by
astute stock market
investments, allowed Maugham to
live a very comfortable life.
Small and weak as a boy,
Maugham had been proud even
then of his stamina, and as an
adult he kept churning out the
books, proud that he could.
Yet, despite his triumphs, he
never attracted the highest
respect from the critics or his
peers. Maugham himself
attributed this to his lack of
"lyrical quality", his small
vocabulary and failure to make
expert use of metaphor in his
work.
Maugham wrote in a time when
experimental modernist
literature such as that of
William Faulkner, Thomas Mann,
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
was gaining increasing
popularity and winning critical
acclaim. In this context, his
plain prose style was
criticized as "such a tissue of
clichés that one's wonder is
finally aroused at the writer's
ability to assemble so many and
at his unfailing inability to
put anything in an individual
way".
Maugham's homosexual leanings
also shaped his fiction, in two
ways. Since, in life, he tended
to see attractive women as
sexual rivals, he often gave
the women of his fiction sexual
needs and appetites, in a way
quite unusual for authors of
his time. "Liza of Lambeth,"
"Cakes and Ale" and "The
Razor's Edge" all featured
women determined to service
their strong sexual appetites,
heedless of the result.
Also, the fact that Maugham's
own sexual appetites were
highly disapproved of, or even
criminal, in nearly all of the
countries in which he traveled,
made Maugham unusually tolerant
of the vices of others. Readers
and critics often complained
that Maugham did not clearly
enough condemn what was bad in
the villains of his fiction and
plays. Maugham replied in 1938:
"It must be a fault in me that
I am not gravely shocked at the
sins of others unless they
personally affect me."
Maugham's public view of his
abilities remained modest;
towards the end of his career
he described himself as "in the
very first row of the
second-raters". In 1954, he was
made a Companion of Honour.
Maugham had begun collecting
theatrical paintings before the
First World War and continued
to the point where his
collection was second only to
that of the Garrick Club. In
1948 he announced that he would
bequeath this collection to the
Trustees of the National
Theatre, and from 1951, some 14
years before his death, his
paintings began their
exhibition life. In 1994 they
were placed on loan to the
Theatre Museum in Covent
Garden.
Significant
works
Maugham's masterpiece is
generally agreed to be Of Human
Bondage, an autobiographical
novel that deals with the life
of the main character Philip
Carey, who like Maugham, was
orphaned and brought up by his
pious uncle. Philip's clubfoot
causes him endless
self-consciousness and
embarrassment, echoing
Maugham's struggles with his
stutter. Later successful
novels were also based on
real-life characters: The Moon
and Sixpence fictionalizes the
life of Paul Gauguin; and Cakes
and Ale contains thinly veiled
characterizations of authors
Thomas Hardy and Hugh
Walpole.
Maugham's last major novel, The
Razor's Edge, published in
1944, was a departure for him
in many ways. While much of the
novel takes place in Europe,
its main characters are
American, not British. The
protagonist is a disillusioned
veteran of World War I who
abandons his wealthy friends
and lifestyle, travelling to
India seeking enlightenment.
The story's themes of Eastern
mysticism and war-weariness
struck a chord with readers as
World War II waned, and a movie
adaptation quickly
followed.
Among his short stories, some
of the most memorable are those
dealing with the lives of
Western, mostly British,
colonists in the Far East, and
are typically concerned with
the emotional toll exacted on
the colonists by their
isolation. Some of his more
outstanding works in this genre
include Rain, Footprints In The
Jungle, and The Outstation.
Rain, in particular, which
charts the moral disintegration
of a missionary attempting to
convert the Pacific island
prostitute Sadie Thompson, has
kept its fame and been made
into a movie several times.
Maugham said that many of his
short stories presented
themselves to him in the
stories he heard during his
travels in the outposts of the
Empire. He left behind a long
string of angry former hosts,
and a contemporary anti-Maugham
writer retraced his footsteps
and wrote a record of his
journeys called "Gin And
Bitters". Maugham's restrained
prose allows him to explore the
resulting tensions and passions
without appearing melodramatic.
His The Magician (1908) is
based on British occultist
Aleister Crowley.
Maugham was one of the most
significant travel writers of
the inter-war years, and can be
compared with contemporaries
such as Evelyn Waugh and Freya
Stark. His best efforts in this
line include The Gentleman In
The Parlour, dealing with a
journey through Burma, Siam,
Cambodia and Vietnam, and On A
Chinese Screen, a series of
very brief vignettes which
might almost be notes for short
stories that were never
written.
Influenced by the published
journals of the French writer
Jules Renard, which Maugham had
often enjoyed for their
conscientiousness, wisdom and
wit, Maugham published in 1949
selections from his own
journals under the title "A
Writer's Notebook". Although
these journal selections are,
by nature, episodic and of
varying quality, they range
over more than 50 years of the
writer's life and contain much
that Maugham scholars and
admirers find of interest.
Influence
In 1947 Maugham instituted the
Somerset Maugham Award, awarded
to the best British writer or
writers under the age of
thirty-five of a work of
fiction published in the past
year. Notable winners include
V.S. Naipaul, Kingsley Amis,
Martin Amis and Thom Gunn. On
his death, Maugham donated his
copyrights to the Royal
Literary Fund.
One of very few later writers
to praise his influence was
Anthony Burgess, who included a
complex fictional portrait of
Maugham in the novel Earthly
Powers. George Orwell also
stated that his writing style
was influenced by Maugham. The
American writer Paul Theroux,
in his short story collection
The Consul's File, updated
Maugham's colonial world in an
outstation of expatriates in
modern Malaysia. Holden
Caulfield, in J.D. Salinger's
1951 The Catcher in the Rye,
mentions that although he read
Of Human Bondage the previous
summer and liked it, he
wouldn't want to call Somerset
Maugham up on the phone.
Source : Some
of the information on this page
came from a Wikipedia
article and is
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