W. Somerset Maugham

Artist Info

W. Somerset MaughamParis, 1874 - 1965, Nice, France

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79036830

Maugham, (William) Somerset (1874–1965), writer and playwright, was born at the British embassy, Paris, on 25 January 1874, youngest of the four sons of Robert Ormond Maugham (1823–1884), partner in Maugham et Fils, solicitors, and Edith Mary (1840–1882), daughter of Major Charles Snell and Anne Snell, who became a successful French novelist following the death of her husband. His grandfather Robert Maugham (1788–1862) and brother Frederic Herbert Maugham, first Viscount Maugham (1866–1958), were distinguished lawyers and authors of legal works, while his brother Harry was a poet, essayist, and travel writer. The Maughams were a north of England family of Norman descent, not Irish as often erroneously stated.

Youth

Maugham's mother died of tuberculosis when he was seven and his father of cancer three years later. He had been brought up by servants in Paris and, with his brothers at school in England, his childhood was lonely and continued to be so when he left France to live with a childless couple, his uncle, Henry Maugham, vicar of Whitstable, Kent, and Barbara, his German-born wife.

French was Maugham's first language and when he attended King's School, Canterbury, he was taunted for his inadequate English and as a result developed a defensive speech hesitancy which never entirely left him and intensified in times of stress. He moved to Heidelberg when he was sixteen to learn German and came under the influence of John Ellingham Brooks, who seduced him. Ten years his senior and an ostentatious homosexual, Brooks encouraged his ambitions to be a writer and introduced him to the works of Schopenhauer and Spinoza. Maugham returned to England when he was eighteen and, instead of becoming an accountant or a parson as his uncle proposed, enrolled as a student at St Thomas's Hospital, London, where he believed he would have personal freedom and the time to write.

Early writing

Maugham managed to qualify as a doctor in 1897 but never practised medicine because he was encouraged to continue writing by the modest success of a novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in the same year. Set in the slums of Lambeth, it reflected the author's knowledge of local people from his experiences in the out-patients' department and on the wards of St Thomas's Hospital, and from visiting them in the grim hovels where they lived in poverty and squalor. Commenting on the slums in his preface to the 1934 edition of the novel, he said it was somewhere ‘the police hesitated to penetrate but where your [doctor's] black bag protected you from harm’ (p. vii). The story of Liza, a fun-loving factory worker, and her affair with Jim, a married man, was leavened by comedy to relieve stark scenes of brutality such as the street fight between the pregnant Liza and Jim's wife which leads to Liza's miscarriage and death. The story and its setting outraged the Victorian sensibilities of critics: ‘it reeks of the pot-house’, said the Daily Mail on 7 September, but added that it was cleverly written. The stir caused by the novel did Maugham no harm but the publicity took an ugly turn when he was accused in The Academy of 11 September of plagiarism. It asserted that he had ‘imitated’ Arthur Morrison: ‘The mimicry, indeed, is deliberate and unashamed’. Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets (1894), a collection of short stories, banned in some quarters, included one about Liza Hunt of Bow to which Liza of Lambeth bore similarities which went beyond mere coincidence. Unwisely, Maugham denied the charge in a long and disingenuous reply. Forty years later in his volume of autobiographical reflections The Summing up (1938) he finally admitted to Morrison's influence. The incident had no effect on his ultimate financial success but it left a shadow of doubt over his integrity and alerted his detractors to his propensity for lying. Other novels which followed, such as Mrs Craddock (1902), and The Merry-Go-Round (1904), made little impression on the book-buying public. They did, however, gain him some prestige and he was welcomed into ‘society’ partly through his brother Frederic's in-laws, the wealthy Romer family. He was also introduced into bohemian literary and theatrical circles by his aesthete brother Harry, Ellingham Brooks, and Walter Adney Payne, whom he had met in Germany. He now lived with Payne, who supported him financially.

Maugham's persistent attempts to interest theatrical managements in his plays were not helped by the failure of a West End production of A Man of Honour in 1904. But in 1907 the Court Theatre in Sloane Square, London, put on Lady Frederick to replace a flop and it became a surprise success. Within a year four of Maugham's plays were running in the West End, and a sketch by Bernard Partridge in Punch (24 June 1908) showed a worried Shakespeare in front of the playbills. Maugham's success was repeated in New York, and he celebrated his good fortune by moving into a lavishly appointed house in Mayfair, London, with Walter Payne. As well-to-do bachelors, both men were socially popular. Contemporary photographs show Maugham, a small man, to be good looking, sexy, and fashion-conscious. His dandyism was captured by Sir Gerald Kelly in a full-length portrait of 1911 (Tate Collection).

Maugham's drama was in the tradition of Wilde and Pinero, as his major successes, including Home and Beauty (1919), The Circle (1921), and The Letter (1927), illustrate. In 1933, with the failure of an experimental comedy, Sheppey, he retired from the theatre having written over thirty plays. He continued to be represented, however, by frequent revivals and by adaptations of his stories by other writers, such as Rain (by John Colton and Clemence Randolph, 1922), and Before the Party (by Rodney Ackland, 1949).

Critical success

Maugham's novel Of Human Bondage (1915) was a heavily revised and amplified version of an unpublished novel, a fictionalized work of autobiography, ‘The artistic temperament of Stephen Carey’, which he described in an address to the Library of Congress on 20 April 1946 as ‘very crude and very immature’. (On this occasion he presented the manuscript of Of Human Bondage to the library and followed it with the manuscript of ‘The artistic temperament of Stephen Carey’ in 1950.) As the title indicates, his first draft examined the development of an artistic disposition, but in the new version the emphasis was on the shedding of the clutter of a conventional religious upbringing to free the individual's spirit. Through its pages, as Maugham put it in his address, he rid himself of those memories of an unhappy past which hindered him. He renamed his hero Philip and gave him a club-foot to induce sympathy and to explain his inhibitions. Most of the novel mirrors Maugham's life and contains vivid scenes set in childhood and as a young man in Heidelberg and Paris. The emotional centre of the book is Philip's sexual obsession with Mildred, a waitress in an ABC café, who is indifferent to him but ready to exploit his love as long as it suits her. She soon leaves him and he believes he is free of her until he sees her soliciting in Piccadilly; overwhelmed with pity but not lust, he gives a home to her and her newly born child. After a terrible row in which she abuses him, calling him ‘Cripple!’, and after smashing up his possessions, she storms off. The novel ends somewhat unconvincingly when Philip settles down to a conventional marriage and life as a country doctor but not before Mildred makes a final appearance. She is working as a prostitute again but is in the throes of venereal disease. He begs her to give up the life because she is a danger to others. Her response is true to character: ‘What do I care? Let them take their chance’ (Of Human Bondage, 1915, 611).

There is no evidence that Mildred was based on a specific individual, but in homosexual circles it was claimed by the likes of Beverley Nichols, one of Maugham's many lovers, that the original of Mildred was a youth, probably a rent boy, with whom he became infatuated. This was endorsed by another lover, Harry Philips, in a letter to Joseph Drobinsky of 16 September 1966.

The novel was coolly received in Britain and America and became a best-seller only after an effusive review by the influential American critic and distinguished novelist Theodore Dreiser in the New Republic (25 December 1915), in which he described the book as of ‘the utmost importance’ and its author as a ‘great artist’. After this it seemed that Maugham could not fail, and the public eagerly bought his novels such as The Moon and Sixpence (1919), and The Painted Veil (1925), together with volumes of his carefully crafted short stories. These included many that had appeared in magazines such as The Cosmopolitan. His novel most likely to survive is Cakes and Ale (1930), a satire on the literary world and a cynical dissection of the nature of lust. In his favourable review for The Graphic on 15 October 1930 Evelyn Waugh referred to Maugham's ‘supreme adroitness and ease’ as well as his ‘brilliant technical dexterity’. The merits of the novel were overshadowed by a controversy over the identity of the central figure Edward Driffield, a grand old man of letters who was presented in an unflattering light. It was seen as a direct attack on Thomas Hardy, who had died in 1928. Maugham deflected press indignation easily enough but it was more difficult to deny that a malicious portrait of a best-selling novelist, Alroy Kear, was based on Hugh Walpole, but deny it he did. Walpole was devastated and only slightly mollified by an evasive letter from Maugham dismissing the idea that he could do such a thing to an old friend. In his preface to the Modern Library edition (1950) he admitted the truth but added that Walpole was easy to like but difficult to respect. It is now accepted that Maugham hated Walpole for reasons that have never been clear.

The most memorable character in the book was Rosie, a vulgar, cheerful country girl, who exuded sex appeal and who happily slept with any man attracted to her. Unlike Mildred in Of Human Bondage, to whom she bears some resemblance, she demanded nothing of her men in return for her favours. Because much of Maugham's work was fictionalized biography there was speculation as to the identity of the ‘real’ Rosie. It was not until his memoir Looking Back (1962) that Maugham revealed his eight-year affair with a woman, not named, but identifiable from numerous clues as Ethelwyn Sue Jones (1883–1948) the actress daughter of the popular playwright Henry Arthur Jones. Commentators putting two and two together became convinced that Rosie was based on Sue. However, despite Maugham's claim to have had an affair with an unnamed woman, there has never been any evidence that an affair took place or that it was with Sue Jones. The artist Gerald Kelly, who painted her portrait, believed that Maugham was in love with her.

Maugham's stories with their vivid characters proved eminently suitable for innumerable cinema and later television adaptations. These brought him even greater fame and added substantially to his wealth. It is curious that, although there have been some forty films of Maugham's work ranging from The Magician (1926) to Up at the Villa (2000), a film of Cakes and Ale has not been attempted. Hollywood had no problem in simplifying the more complicated Of Human Bondage by concentrating on the relationship between Philip and Mildred, played by Leslie Howard and Bette Davis in the first of three versions. Nor was it daunted by The Razor's Edge (1948), another saga of a young man's search for spiritual freedom in which the action ranged from Chicago to India via Europe. Clearly the film industry relished the exotic settings of many of Maugham's stories, such as the south seas in Rain (1932) and The Beachcomber (1938), Tahiti in the Gauguin-inspired The Moon and Sixpence (1942), Hong Kong in The Painted Veil (1934), Malaya in The Letter (1940), and the East Indies in The Narrow Corner (1933). The homosexuality implicit in the novel (1932) was carefully expunged from this and a second film adaptation in 1936. In The Razor's Edge, however, Elliot Templeton, an obvious closet queen, played with relish by Clifton Webb went unremarked in 1948.

British cinema did well with Maugham's short stories as source material: Hitchcock's underrated The Secret Agent (1936) from Ashenden, and Quartet (1948), Trio (1950), and Encore (1951). These last three films were introduced by Maugham himself. In America CBS produced nearly forty versions of the short stories for television and British television followed with its own adaptation of some of them.

Relationships

Though primarily homosexual Maugham reluctantly married a divorcee, Syrie Wellcome, née Barnardo (1879–1955) [see Maugham, (Gwendoline Maud) Syrie], interior designer, in America in 1917, ostensibly to give his name to her daughter Liza, born in Rome in 1915. The marriage was unhappy and after they divorced in France in 1929 he denied that Liza was his natural daughter.

The mainstay of Maugham's life was Gerald Haxton (1892–1944), an Anglo-American whom he had first met in London before the First World War. They served together in the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps (1914–15) but parted when Haxton joined the American army and Maugham went to Switzerland, and later Russia, for British intelligence. His wartime experiences formed the basis of Ashenden (1928), tales of a secret agent. In 1919 Haxton was refused re-entry to the UK for reasons successive British governments have refused to disclose. This was no problem for Maugham, who had spent most of his time abroad to avoid the criminal law that had imprisoned Oscar Wilde. The two men travelled round the world together and eventually set up home at the Villa Mauresque, Cap Ferrat, on the French riviera, in 1927. It was Haxton's athleticism, charm, exuberance, and often coarse sense of humour which pleased and sometimes startled Maugham, but his role of uncredited collaborator added substance to the relationship. He was much maligned by rivals for Maugham's affections, who underestimated the bond between them.

Following the outbreak of war in 1939 they went to America where they both worked for the newly established office of strategic services (later the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Haxton died of tuberculosis in New York in 1944, aged fifty-two. The Razor's Edge, published in the same year, was the last book he influenced, and it was also Maugham's final major success.

Last years

Waiting to replace Haxton was Alan Searle (1905–1985), Maugham's ‘London’ secretary, and, sporadically, his lover. He was seen by some as a near saint and by others, particularly the Maugham family, as a villain, but for better or worse he was to dominate the author's life and his control was strengthened by Maugham's decline into dementia. The final years were marked by misguided legal disputes and the memoir Looking Back (1962), allegedly written by Maugham but owned by Searle, in which he denigrated his late former wife, was dismissive of Haxton, and made a clumsy attempt to deny his homosexuality by claiming he was a red-blooded heterosexual. These stratagems distressed his friends and made him a laughing-stock, but his status as a grand old man of letters appeared to be unaffected. He was appointed CH in 1954 and CLitt in 1961. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a commander of the Légion d'honneur, and an honorary DLitt of the universities of Oxford and Toulouse. On his eightieth birthday the Garrick Club, largely prompted by Beverley Nichols, gave a dinner in his honour; only Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope had received similar recognition.

It was typical of Maugham's sense of irony that he was generous to King's School, Canterbury, where he had been so unhappy. His gifts included a new library building, many of his valuable books, and a substantial legacy. As proof of his belief that he owed his success to the educational benefits of travel, he founded the Somerset Maugham award in 1947 to give young writers a similar opportunity. He also left royalties in all his work to the Royal Literary Fund. In addition to public acts of financial generosity there were many kindnesses done in private which went beyond mere monetary gifts.

Maugham died in the Anglo-American Hospital in Nice on 15 December 1965 and after cremation in Marseilles five days later, his ashes were interred in the grounds of King's School, Canterbury, on 22 December.

Posthumous reputation

Released from legal restraint there were those, including his nephew Robin Maugham, Beverley Nichols, and Noël Coward, ready to reveal Maugham's homosexuality, which he had kept from the public. This was partly a reaction to the hypocrisy of Looking Back and to settle old scores. Opinions as to his status as a writer continue to be divided. His detractors agreed with Lytton Strachey, who categorized him as ‘class II, division I’ (Curtis, 169) in 1925, and with the critic Edmund Wilson, who wrote in the New Yorker on 8 June 1946: ‘I have never been able to convince myself he was anything but second rate’. Maugham in The Summing up (1938) complained: ‘When clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering me’ (p. 221). Yet his list of admirers was impressive, including W. H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, Paul Dottin, Christopher Isherwood, and Desmond MacCarthy. It was typical of the man that even in old age, with honours heaped upon him, he still believed he had not received his full due. The fact remains that he was one of the most commercially successful and gifted writers of the twentieth century, whose work remains in print in the twenty-first.

Bryan Connon

Sources

B. Connon, Somerset Maugham and the Maugham dynasty (1997) · R. Maugham, Somerset Maugham and all the Maughams (1966) · T. Morgan, Somerset Maugham (1980) · R. Calder, Willie (1989) · A. Curtis, The pattern of Maugham (1974) · F. Raphael, Somerset Maugham (1989) · B. Nichols, A case of human bondage (1966) · DNB · private information (2004) [Honor Earl; Mrs Diana Marr-Johnson; Lord Glendevon]