MICHAEL BARBER
considers Somerset Maugham, the 20th century’s bestselling author – but was he second rate?
Somerset Maugham’s stock in trade was the vanity of human wishes, so it’s somehow appropriate that instead of the Order of Merit, which he believed he deserved, he had to make do with the Companion of Honour: ‘It means, Very well done, but …’ Was he ‘second-rate’, as his detractors alleged? Perhaps. But writers as different as George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and John le Carré said they learnt from him. And Maugham himself wondered ‘why, with all my faults, I have been read for so many years by so many people’.
One answer might be that he dealt with fundamental issues like greed, lust, love, courage, betrayal and death. He was also easy to read. ‘Too easy,’ sniffed some critics. But as Maugham noted, with characteristic pith, ‘To write simply is as difficult as to be good.’ He served a long literary apprenticeship, which was not helped by having spent his early years speaking French: his father worked at the British Embassy in Paris. On the other hand, orphaned at ten and then exposed to the rigours of Victorian boarding schools, which left him with a stammer, he experienced the ‘moderate unhappiness in childhood’ which is thought beneficial to future writers.
Obliged to choose a profession at 18, Maugham became a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital in 1892. His duties there gave him the material for his first novel, Liza of
Lambeth, the modest success of which, allied to a small private income, encouraged him to write full time once he’d qualified. To begin with he found dialogue easier to master than narrative or description. And it was as a very successful Edwardian playwright, who at one point had four plays running in the West End, that he made his name. Of
Human Bondage, which established him as a novelist, was not published until September 1915, by which time his private life had become a mess.
Maugham rated sex as ‘the keenest pleasure to which the body is susceptible’. The writer Beverley Nichols said he was ‘the most sexually voracious man I’ve ever known’. But as Maugham confessed to his nephew Robin, ‘I persuaded myself I was three-quarters normal and onequarter queer, when really it was the other way round.’ So although he agreed to do the decent thing and marry Syrie Wellcome, the mother of his daughter, he only had eyes for Gerald Haxton, ‘Master Hacky’, the feckless, hard-drinking American hustler who for 30 years shared his life.
Maugham met Haxton in 1914 while serving with an ambulance unit in Flanders. Later he joined Military Intelligence and was sent as a go-between to Geneva, then full of spies, using writing as his cover. His duties had more of the cloak than the dagger, as was apparent when, calling himself Willie Ashenden, he came to fictionalise them. This unromantic view of espionage presaged the British spy story as patented in the Thirties by Eric Ambler. Ashenden and his ‘perfidy’ were denounced by Goebbels in 1940, following which the Gestapo added Maugham to their blacklist.
Unwilling to live more than a few weeks at a time with Syrie, who divorced him in 1927, Maugham spent much of the Twenties travelling
Chips Channon snobbishly said Maugham ‘was not of course a gentleman’
in the tropics with Haxton, who possessed the ‘engaging comehitherness’ that Maugham lacked. Expatriates opened up to Haxton, who repeated what they said to Maugham, who turned their anecdotes into stories. When not travelling the couple based themselves at a well-appointed villa on the French Riviera, described by Maugham as that ‘sunny place for shady people’. Lurid stories circulated about what went on there, but guests were instructed that Maugham’s mornings were consecrated to writing, and woe betide anyone who interrupted him.
In 1930 Cakes and Ale, arguably Maugham’s greatest novel, was published. He also acquired a huge new following thanks to the talkies. Noting how many of his books and stories were filmed, Gore Vidal said that ‘he dominfated the movies at a time when movies were the lingua
franca of the world’. Later his work also found favour with television, a medium that offered Maugham a role himself, hamming it up as the worldly-wise Old Party who knows what fools we mortals be.
The diarist Chips Channon snobbishly said Maugham ‘was not of course a gentleman’. Maugham might well have agreed, because as his alter ego, Ashenden, acknowledged in
Cakes and Ale, ‘It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.’ Just how hard became all too apparent during Maugham’s last decade. Instead of letting nature take its course he went, aged 80, to a Swiss clinic that specialised in ‘fresh-cell therapy’, a rejuvenation technique that did wonders for the body but not the mind. He developed a bad case of senile paranoia and egged on by Haxton’s successor, Alan Searle, vilified Syrie, who had died several years before, and tried to disinherit their daughter. Aghast, most of his old friends dropped him and his last years were bleak. But, lest we forget, the most popular British author since Dickens left much of his vast estate to the Royal Literary Fund, where even now it helps needy writers. There are worse legacies.