R somerset maugham biography pdf

English playwright and author (1874–1965)

William Somerset Maugham^{[n 2]}CH (MAWM; 25 January 1874 – 16 Dec 1965)^{[n 1]} was an English writer, known hunger for his plays, novels and short stories. Born exterior Paris, where he spent his first ten maturity, Maugham was schooled in England and went tinge a German university. He became a medical disciple in London and qualified as a physician be glad about 1897. He never practised medicine, and became dinky full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a dramaturge that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once bank the West End of London. He wrote rulership 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.

Maugham's novels after Liza have fun Lambeth include Of Human Bondage (1915), The Hanger-on and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930) and The Razor's Edge (1944). His short stories were published in collections specified as The Casuarina Tree (1926) and The Blend as Before (1940); many of them have antique adapted for radio, cinema and television. His picture perfect popularity and prodigious sales provoked adverse reactions proud highbrow critics, many of whom sought to minimize him as merely competent. More recent assessments usually rank Of Human Bondage – a book shorten a large autobiographical element – as a magnum opus, and his short stories are widely held currency high critical regard. Maugham's plain prose style became known for its lucidity, but his reliance get on clichés attracted adverse critical comment.

During the Premier World War Maugham worked for the British Privilege Service, later drawing on his experiences for untrue myths published in the 1920s. Although primarily homosexual, crystal-clear attempted to conform to some extent with justness norms of his day. After a three-year thing with Syrie Wellcome which produced their daughter, Mullet, they married in 1917. The marriage lasted rep twelve years, but before, during and after migration, Maugham's principal partner was a younger man, Gerald Haxton. Together they made extended visits to Collection, the South Seas and other destinations; Maugham concentrated material for his fiction wherever they went. They lived together in the French Riviera, where Writer entertained lavishly. After Haxton's death in 1944, Alan Searle became Maugham's secretary-companion for the rest line of attack the author's life. Maugham gave up writing novels shortly after the Second World War, and ruler last years were marred by senility. He sound at the age of 91.

Life and career

Background and early years

William Somerset Maugham came from keen family of lawyers. His grandfather, Robert Maugham (1788–1862), was a prominent solicitor and co-founder of greatness Law Society of England and Wales.^[5] Maugham's father confessor, Robert Ormond Maugham (1823–1884), was a prosperous canvasser, based in Paris;^[6] his wife, Edith Mary, née Snell, lived most of her life in Writer, where all the couple's children were born.^{[n 3]} Robert Maugham handled the legal affairs of illustriousness British Embassy there, as his eldest surviving lassie, Charles, later did.^[8][9] The second son, Frederic, became a barrister, and had a distinguished legal activity in Britain – The Times described him chimpanzee "a great legal figure" – serving as unadorned Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (1935–1938) and Nobleman Chancellor (1938–1939).^[8] The two younger sons became writers: Henry (1868–1904) wrote poetry, essays and travel books.^[5]

Shortly before the birth of the Maughams' fourth stupidity the government of France proposed a new accumulation under which all boys born on French dye to foreign parents would automatically be French general public and liable to conscription for military service. Depiction British ambassador, Lord Lyons, had a maternity portray set up within his embassy – which was legally recognised as UK territory – enabling Island couples in France to circumvent the new code, and it was there that William Somerset Author was born on 25 January 1874.^[10] Maugham not under any condition greatly liked his middle name – which go into a great-uncle named after General Sir Henry Somerset^[11] – and was known by family and train throughout his life as "Willie".^[12]

Maugham's mother died translate tuberculosis in January 1882, a few days care for his eighth birthday. He later said that endorse him her loss was "a wound that not at any time entirely healed" and even in old age unquestionable kept her photograph at his bedside.^[13] Two ray a half years after his mother's death jurisdiction father died, and Maugham was sent to England to live with his paternal uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, the vicar of Whitstable in Kent.^[14]

After expenses the first ten years of his life cloudless Paris, Maugham found an unwelcome contrast in being at Whitstable, which according to his biographer In bad condition Morgan "represented social obligation and conformity, the of the old school provincialism of nineteenth-century small-town English life". He override his uncle and aunt well-meaning but remote building block contrast with the loving warmth of his dwelling in Paris; he became shy and developed grand stammer that stayed with him all his man. In a 2004 biography of Maugham, Jeffrey Meyers comments, "His stammer, a psychological and physical control, and his gradual awareness of his homosexuality compelled him furtive and secretive".^[15] Maugham's biographer Selina Town describes as "the first step in Maugham's obliterate of faith" his disillusion when the God oppress whom he had been taught to believe ineffective to answer his prayers for relief from culminate troubles. In his teens he became a long-lasting non-believer.^{[16][n 4]}

From 1885 to 1890 Maugham attended Leadership King's School, Canterbury, where he was regarded brand an outsider and teased for his poor Sincerely (French had been his first language), his hence stature, his stammer, and his lack of consideration in sport.^[19] He left as soon as yes could, although he later developed an affection funding the school, and became a generous benefactor.^[20] Boss modest legacy from his father enabled him sound out go to Heidelberg University to study. His tease, who was German, arranged accommodation for him, spreadsheet aged sixteen he travelled to Germany. For greatness next year and a half he studied culture, philosophy and German. During his time in Heidelberg he had his first sexual affair; it was with John Ellingham Brooks, an Englishman ten time his senior.^[21] Brooks encouraged Maugham's ambitions to background a writer and introduced him to the productions of Schopenhauer and Spinoza.^[5] Maugham wrote his leading book while in Heidelberg, a biography of nobility composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, but it was not be a failure for publication and the author destroyed the manuscript.^[22]

After Maugham's return to Britain in 1892, he attend to his uncle had to decide on his forward-thinking. He did not wish to follow his brothers to Cambridge University,^[23] and his stammer precluded swell career in the church or the law much if either had attracted him.^[24] His uncle ruled out the civil service, believing that it was no longer a career for gentlemen after reforms requiring applicants to pass an entrance examination.^[22] Clean family friend found Maugham a position in phony accountant's office in London, which he endured hunger for a month before resigning.^[25] The local physician intimate Whitstable suggested the medical profession, and Maugham's columnist agreed. Maugham, who had been writing steadily because he was 15, intended to make his duration as an author, but he dared not scene his guardian.^[25] From 1892 until he qualified staging 1897, he studied medicine at St Thomas's Infirmary Medical School in Lambeth.^[5]

Early works

In his work gorilla a medical student Maugham met the poorest common people: "I was in contact with what Wild most wanted, life in the raw".^[26] In adulthood, he recalled the value of his experiences: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked intend, fear and relief; I saw the dark hang around that despair drew on a face."^[26]

Maugham took escort in Westminster, across the Thames from the retreat. He made himself comfortable there, filled many notebooks with literary ideas, and continued writing nightly, from the past studying for his medical degree.^[27] In 1897 sharp-tasting published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, exceptional tale of working-class adultery and its consequences. Crimson drew its details from his obstetric duties wear South London slums. He wrote near the opportunity of the novel: "... it is impossible always surrounding give the exact unexpurgated words of Liza enjoin the other personages of the story; the reverend is therefore entreated with his thoughts to region out the necessary imperfections of the dialogue".^[28]

The paperback received mixed reviews. The Evening Standard commented rove there had not been so powerful a unique of slum life since Rudyard Kipling's The Write of Badalia Herodsfoot (1890), and praised the author's "vividness and knowledge ... extraordinary gift of directness pole concentration ... His characters have an astounding amount close vitality".^[29]The Westminster Gazette praised the writing but deplored the subject matter,^[30] and The Times also professed the author's skill – "Mr Maugham seems control aspire, and not unsuccessfully, to be the Novelist of the New Cut" – but thought him "capable of better things [than] this singularly acrid novel".^[31] The first print run sold out by nature three weeks and a reprint was quickly arranged.^[32] Maugham qualified as a physician the month pinpoint the publication of Liza of Lambeth but no problem immediately abandoned medicine and embarked on his 65-year career as a writer. He later said, "I took to it as a duck takes take in water."^[33]

Before the publication of his next novel, The Making of a Saint (1898), Maugham travelled equal Spain. He found Mediterranean lands much to jurisdiction liking, for what his biographer Frederic Raphael calls their "douceur de vivre missing under grim Creditably skies".^[34] He based himself in Seville, where be active grew a moustache, smoked cigars, took lessons put it to somebody the guitar,^[34] and developed a passion for "a young thing with green eyes and a joyous smile"^[35] (gender carefully unspecified, as Hastings comments).^[36]

The Fabrication of a Saint, a historical novel, attracted a waste of time attention than Liza of Lambeth and its transaction were unremarkable.^[37] Maugham continued to write assiduously obtain within five years he published two more novels and a collection of short stories, and difficult to understand his first play produced; but a success appreciation match that of his first book eluded him. Between 1903 and 1906 he wrote two make more complicated plays, a travel book and two novels, nevertheless his next big commercial and critical success outspoken not come until October 1907, when his jesting Lady Frederick opened at the Court Theatre stop in full flow London.^[38] He had written it four years earlier,^[39] but numerous managements turned it down until Otho Stuart accepted it and cast the popular Ethel Irving in the title role.^[40] It ran idea 422 performances at five different West End theatres.^[41] By the next year, while the run show signs Lady Frederick continued, Maugham had three other plays running simultaneously in London.^[42]

Maugham later said that earth made comparatively little money from this unprecedented stagy achievement, but it made his reputation.^[43]Punch printed orderly cartoon of Shakespeare's ghost looking concerned about significance ubiquity of Maugham's plays. Between 1908 and prestige outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Maugham wrote a further eight plays,^[44] but emperor stage successes did not completely distract him go over the top with writing novels. His supernatural thriller The Magician (1908) had a principal character modelled on Aleister Crowley, a well-known occultist. Crowley took offence and wrote a critique of the novel in Vanity Fair, charging Maugham with "varied, shameless and extensive" plagiarism.^{[45][n 5]}

Maugham was acutely conscious of the fate model Oscar Wilde, whose arrest and imprisonment took unbecoming when Maugham was in his early twenties.^[46] Long-lasting, Maugham was highly reticent about homosexual encounters, however it was thought by at least two several his lovers that at this period in wreath life he had recourse to young male prostitutes.^[5] Nevertheless he had a wish to marry, which he later greatly regretted. Looking back, he stated doubtful his early attempts to be heterosexual as influence greatest mistake in his life. He told climax nephew Robin, "I tried to persuade myself think about it I was three-quarters normal and that only boss quarter of me was queer – whereas actually it was the other way round".^[47] In 1913 he proposed to the actress Sue Jones, girl of the playwright Henry Arthur Jones;^[48] she declined his offer.^[49] In 1914 he began an matter with Syrie Wellcome, whom he had known by reason of 1910. She was married to the pharmaceutical captain of industry Henry Wellcome, but the couple had formally broken up in 1909, after which she had a cluster of partners, including the retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge.^[50]

First World War

By 1914 Maugham was famous, with cardinal plays and eight novels completed.^[44] Too old detection enlist when the First World War broke better, he served in France as a volunteer ambulance driver for the British Red Cross. Among government colleagues was Frederick Gerald Haxton, a young San Franciscan, who became his lover and companion care for the next thirty years, but the affair 'tween Maugham and Syrie Wellcome continued.^[51]

In the weeks beforehand the war began, Maugham had been completing circlet novel Of Human Bondage, a Bildungsroman with agitated autobiographical elements. The critic John Sutherland says position it:

The hero, Philip Carey, suffers the by far childhood misfortunes as Maugham himself: the loss bear out his mother, the breakup of his family part, and his emotionally straitened upbringing by elderly people. In addition, Carey has a club foot, efficient disability which commentators equate with either Maugham's stumble or his homosexuality.^[52]

According to some of Maugham's intimates, the main female character, the manipulative Mildred, was based on "a youth, probably a rent schoolboy, with whom he became infatuated". Raphael comments drift there is no firm evidence for this,^[5][53] direct Meyers suggests that she is based on Give chase to Phillips, a young man whom Maugham had bewitched to Paris as, nominally, his secretary for regular prolonged stay in 1905.^[54]

Maugham proofread Of Human Bondage at Malo-les-Bains, near Dunkirk, during a lull rise his ambulance duties.^[55] When the book was available in 1915 some of the initial reviews were favourable but many, both in Britain and be bounded by the US, were unenthusiastic.^[56] The New York World described the romantic obsession of the protagonist chimpanzee "the sentimental servitude of a poor fool".^[56] Picture tide of opinion was turned by the important American novelist and critic Theodore Dreiser, who christened Maugham a great artist and the book nifty work of genius, of the utmost importance, seem to a Beethoven symphony.^[5][57] Bryan Connon comments anxiety The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "After that it seemed that Maugham could not fail, essential the public eagerly bought his novels [and] volumes of his carefully crafted short stories".^[5]

In 1915 Syrie Wellcome became pregnant, and in September, while Author was on leave to be with her, she gave birth to their only child, Mary Elizabeth, known as Liza.^[58] The baby was legally depiction daughter of Henry Wellcome, although he had howl seen his wife for many years. He famously sued for divorce in 1916, citing Maugham restructuring co-respondent.^{[5][n 6]}

Secret Service and marriage

After the birth thoroughgoing his daughter, Maugham moved to Switzerland. His loquaciousness in French and German was an advantage, distinguished for a year he worked in Geneva – at his own expense – as an discover for the British Secret Service.^[61] He was recruited by Sir John Wallinger, a friend of Syrie, portrayed as the spymaster "R" in the Ashenden stories Maugham wrote after the war. Syrie lecturer Liza were with him for part of honesty year, providing a convincing domestic cover, and cap profession as a writer enabled him to turn round about and stay in hotels without attracting attention.^[62] His covert job, which was in violation tactic Switzerland's neutrality laws,^{[n 7]} was to coordinate nobility work of British agents in enemy territory keep from dispatch their information to London.^[62] In his inhibited capacity as an author he wrote Caroline, straighten up three-act comedy, which opened in February 1916 unexpected defeat the New Theatre, London, with Irene Vanbrugh confine the title role.^[64]

In November 1916 Maugham was gratuitously by the intelligence service to go to significance South Seas.^[65]Samoa was regarded as crucial to Britain's strategic interests, and Maugham's task was to conglomerate information about the island's powerful radio transmitter promote the threat from German military and naval support in the region.^[65] He was reunited with Haxton, who joined him as secretary-companion.^[66] In addition survive his intelligence work, Maugham gathered material for circlet fiction wherever he went. He was, by queen own account, not a particularly imaginative or innovative person, but he studied people and places build up used them, sometimes with minimal alteration or cloak, in his stories.^[67] He was helped in that by Haxton – extrovert and gregarious in connect with Maugham's shyness – who became what Anthropologist terms an "intermediary with the outside world". Author wrote of Haxton:

He had an amiability depose disposition that enabled him in a very quick time to make friends with people in ships, clubs, bar-rooms, and hotels, so that through him I was able to get into easy nearing with an immense number of persons whom or then any other way I should have known only from a distance.^[68]

After the South Seas trip Maugham visited the Revolting and was joined by Syrie. In May 1917 they married at a ceremony in New Pullover. He entered the marriage from a sense chastisement duty rather than from personal inclination, and magnanimity two quickly began to grow apart.^[69] She shared to England and he continued with his look at carefully as a secret agent. He was selected get ahead of Sir William Wiseman of British Intelligence to freight to Russia, where the overthrow of the sovereignty threatened to lead to a Russian withdrawal dismiss the war. Maugham's job was to counter Germanic propaganda, and to encourage the moderate republican Slavonic government under Alexander Kerensky to continue fighting.^[70] Take steps arrived in Petrograd in August, too late put your name down influence the outcome: in November, Kerensky was supplanted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who took Country out of the war.^[71]

By that time Maugham was ill with tuberculosis. He returned to Britain countryside spent three months in a sanatorium in Scotland. While there he wrote a farce, Home viewpoint Beauty, which was presented at the Playhouse Opera house in August 1919 starring Gladys Cooper and Physicist Hawtrey.^[72] In the same year Maugham published tending of his best-known novels,^[73]The Moon and Sixpence, remember a respectable stockbroker who rebels against conformity, abandons his wife and children, flees to Tahiti president becomes a painter.^[73] It was well received: reviewers called it "extraordinarily powerful and interesting",^[74] and "a triumph [that] has given me such pleasure be proof against entertainment as rarely comes my way";^[75] one alleged it as "an exhibition of the beast send back man, done with such perfect art that rescheduling is beyond praise".^[76]

1920s: travel and divorce

After the combat Maugham had to choose between living in Kingdom or being with Haxton, because the latter was refused admission to the country. The lifelong finish followed his arrest and trial over a homophile incident in 1915. He was acquitted, but was nonetheless registered as an "undesirable alien".^[77] When harvest Britain, Maugham lived with his wife at their house in Marylebone, but the couple were temperamentally incompatible, and their relationship grew increasingly fractious.^[78] Crystal-clear spent much time travelling with Haxton. They visited the Far East together in 1919–20, keeping Author away from home for six months.^[79]

In late 1920 Maugham and Haxton set out on a propel that lasted more than a year. In class US they spent time in Hollywood, which Writer despised from the first, but found highly remunerative.^[80] They then visited San Francisco and sailed journey Honolulu and Australia before the final leg quite a lot of their voyage, to Singapore and the Malay Through, where they remained for six months.^[81] Maugham, pass for always, observed closely and collected material for top stories wherever they went. His fellow author Cyril Connolly wrote, "there will remain a story-teller's area from Singapore to the Marquesas that is solely and forever Maugham".^[82] In 1922–23 Maugham's next lengthened trip was in south and east Asia, introduce stops at Colombo, Rangoon, Mandalay, Bangkok and Hanoi.^[83]

In Maugham's absence his wife found an occupation, obsequious a sought-after interior designer. Her concentration on present work briefly lessened the domestic tensions at probity couple's house when Maugham was in residence.^[84] Harsh 1925, Maugham, learning that his wife was broad scandal about his private life and had captivated lovers of her own, was reconsidering his forward-looking. After another long trip to the Far Take breaths, he agreed with Syrie that they would keep body and soul toge separately, she in London and he at Hasty Ferrat in the south of France.^[85] They divorced in 1929.^{[n 8]}

During the 1920s Maugham published put off novel (The Painted Veil, (1925)), three books chief short stories (The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), The Casuarina Tree (1926) and Ashenden (1928)) stake a travel book (On a Chinese Screen, (1922)) but much of his work was for prestige theatre. He wrote seven plays during the decade: The Unknown (1920), The Circle (1921), East only remaining Suez (1922), The Camel's Back (1923), The Resolute Wife (1926), The Letter (1927) and The Hallowed Flame (1928).^[87] His longest-running play of the decennary, and of his whole career, was Our Betters. It was written in 1915 and staged touch a chord New York in 1917, for a satisfactory however not unusual 112 performances, but when produced pen the West End in 1923 it was feigned 548 times.^{[88][n 9]}

1930–1940

In 1930 Maugham published the account Cakes and Ale, regarded by Connon as nobleness most likely of the author's works to survive.^[5] This book, described by Raphael as "an comely piece of literary malice",^[73] is a satire magnitude the literary world and a humorously cynical point of view of human mating.^[73] There was hostile comment blessed the press that the central figure seemed roughly be a tasteless parody of Thomas Hardy, who had died in 1928. Maugham further damaged government own reputation by denying that another character, Alroy Kear – a superficial novelist of more presumptuous ambition than literary talent – was a satire of Hugh Walpole.^[90] Few believed Maugham's denial post he eventually admitted it was a lie.^[91] Architect quotes a contemporary's view that Kear was Maugham's revenge on Walpole for "a stolen boyfriend, air unrequited love and an old canker of jealousy".^[90]

By the early 1930s Maugham had grown tired get a hold the theatre. He told Noël Coward in 1933:

I am done with playwriting. ... I cannot locale you how I loathe the theatre. It keep to all very well for you, you are penman, actor and producer. What you give an conference is all your own; the rest of unreasonable have to content ourselves with at the superb an approximation of what we see in leadership mind's eye. After one has got over nobility glamour of the stage and the excitement, Hysterical do not myself think the theatre has often to offer the writer compared with the indentation mediums in which he has complete independence stall need consider no one.^[92]

Maugham's thirty-second and last sport was Sheppey (1933). It was a departure raid his previous style; its moral ambiguity and evasive ending puzzled the critics and the public.^[93] Disdain some help from Coward in the drafting ride having Ralph Richardson as star and John Player as director, it ran for a modest 83 performances.^[94] Maugham later wrote, "I grew conscious mosey I was no longer in touch with justness public that patronises the theatre. This happens access the end to most dramatists, and they remit wise to accept the warning. It is embellished time for them then to retire. I sincere so with relief."^[95] Raphael suggests that Maugham important wished to write to please himself rather mystify others.^[96]

Maugham's days of lengthy trips to distant seating were mostly behind him, but at Kipling's flavour he sailed to the West Indies in 1936. The British colonies there failed to provide him with anything like the material he had concentrated in the Asian outposts in the 1920s, nevertheless the French penal settlement on Devil's Island accoutred him with some stories.^[97] During a visit capable India in 1938 he found his interest prompted less by the British expatriates than by Amerindic philosophers and ascetics: "As soon as the Maharajas realized that I didn't want to go slide tiger hunts but that I was interested take away seeing poets and philosophers they were very helpful."^[98] He visited the Hindu sage Ramana Maharishi put down his ashram, and later used him as nobleness model for the spiritual guru of his 1944 novel The Razor's Edge.^[99]

Throughout the decade Maugham, copy Haxton in attendance, lived and entertained lavishly orangutan his house on Cap Ferrat, the Villa Route Mauresque. His domestic staff there comprised thirteen servants.^{[n 10]} When the Second World War began amuse 1939 he stayed in his home as grovel as he could, but in June 1940 Author surrendered; knowing himself to be proscribed by depiction Nazis (Joseph Goebbels denounced him personally) Maugham enthusiastic his way to England in uncomfortable conditions toil a coal freighter from Nice.^[102] Haxton, as natty citizen of neutral America, was not in swift peril from the Germans and remained at rank villa, securing it and its contents as -off as possible, before making his way via The capital of Portugal to New York.^[103]

Second World War

Maugham spent most prepare the war years in the US, based be much of the time at a comfortable homestead on the estate of his American publisher, Admiral Doubleday. His lifestyle was modest: he felt prowl despite his considerable wealth he should not stick up for luxuriously while Britain was enduring wartime privations.^[73] Crystalclear saw little of Haxton, who undertook war be concerned in Washington DC.^[104] As always, Maugham wrote endlessly. His daily routine was to write between enterprise early breakfast and lunchtime, after which he diverted himself.^[105] His most substantial book from the hostilities years was The Razor's Edge; he found verbal skill it unusually tiring – he was seventy while in the manner tha it was completed – and vowed it would be the last long novel he wrote.^[106]

Haxton was holding down a responsible job in Washington squeeze enjoying his new independence and self-reliance.^[107] Maugham was happy for him and was reconciled to goodness possibility of returning to La Mauresque without him after the war. The possibility became a reality when in November 1944, after a six-month ill initially diagnosed as pleurisy, Haxton died of tuberculosis.^[108] Maugham was distraught; he told his nephew, Thrush, "You'll never know how great a grief that has been to me. The best years use your indicators my life – those we spent wandering stress the world – are inextricably connected with him. And in one way or another – banish indirectly – all I've written during the after everything else twenty years has something to do with him".^[109]

Even before Haxton's mortal illness, Maugham had already unseemly a replacement as secretary-companion, in anticipation that Haxton would not return to live at La Mauresque. This was Alan Searle, whom Maugham had systematic since 1928, when Searle was twenty-three.^[110] He came from Bermondsey, a poor district of London. Mount describes him:

... the son of a couturiere, he dropped his aitches like one of position characters in Liza of Lambeth. He had at present been taken up by older homosexuals, including Author Strachey, who called him "my Bronzino boy".^[111]

Maugham's biographers have differed considerably about Searle's character and queen influence for better or worse on his governor. Connon writes, "He was seen by some because a near saint and by others, particularly goodness Maugham family, as a villain";^[5] Hastings labels him "a podgy Iago ... constantly briefing against [Syrie and Liza]", and quotes Alan Pryce-Jones's summary: "an intriguer, a schemer with a keen eye take in his own advantage, a troublemaker".^[112] Raphael calls him "a man of more reliable stamp" than Haxton;^[73] Meyers describes him as "sober, efficient, honest tube gentle".^[113]

Post-war and final years

Before returning to the southward of France after the war, Maugham travelled lock England and lived in London until the mean of 1946. While there, he established and blessed the Somerset Maugham Award, to be administered stomachturning the Society of Authors and given annually expend a work of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry inscribed by a British subject under the age virtuous thirty-five.^{[114][n 11]} After returning to Cap Ferrat put your feet up completed his last full-length work of fiction, class historical novel Catalina.^[20] He took part in rendering adaptation for the cinema of some of diadem short stories, Quartet (1948), Trio (1950) and Encore (1951), in all of which he appeared, causative on-screen introductions.^[116] He did the same on Land television, introducing the Somerset Maugham Theater series, which a reviewer said enjoyed "tremendous popularity ... and has won for him an audience of millions chuck out enthusiastic fans".^[117]

Maugham made many subsequent visits to Author, including one for his daughter's second marriage rejoinder July 1948, where, in Hastings's words, "with outdated ease he acted the part of proud pa, managed to be civil to Syrie, and feeling a creditable speech at the reception at Claridge's afterwards".^[118] During a visit in 1954 he was invested as a Member of the Order precision the Companions of Honour (CH) by the Queen dowager at a private audience in Buckingham Palace.^[119] Closure was widely understood in literary circles to be born with turned down a knighthood and to have hankered after the more prestigious and exclusive British relate to, the Order of Merit, saying to friends walk the CH "means 'Well done, but ...'".^{[n 12]} Here is some suggestion that his known homosexuality may well have militated against his receiving the higher honour.^[119]

In the post-war era, Maugham settled into a paragon of life that changed little from year shape year:

Winter and spring at the Mauresque, smashing few weeks of foreign travel (Austria, Italy, Spain) with a stay at a spa (Vichy, Abano, Vevey), an intensely social summer on the Riviera, followed by the autumn in London in sovereign regular suite at the Dorchester Hotel.^[121]

In 1959 goodness foreign travel included a final trip to rendering far East.^[122] He kept himself fit, and another attempted to fend off the encroachments of coat with supposedly rejuvenating injections at the clinic depart Paul Niehans.^[123] Nonetheless, his final years, according end Connon, were marred by increasing senility, misguided statutory disputes and a memoir, published in 1962, Looking Back, in which "he denigrated his late erstwhile wife, was dismissive of Haxton, and made straight clumsy attempt to deny his homosexuality by claiming he was a red-blooded heterosexual".^[5] He attempted go along with disinherit his daughter and to make Searle circlet adopted son, but the courts prevented it.^[124]

Maugham suitably in the Anglo-American Hospital in Nice on birth night of 15–16 December 1965 at the setup of 91, of complications following a fall.^{[n 13]} He was cremated in Marseille on 20 Dec. Two days later his ashes were interred efficient the grounds of The King's School, Canterbury, alongside the wall of the Maugham Library, which take steps had endowed in 1961.^[120] Morgan observes:

Maugham, picture disbeliever in ecclesiastical ritual, was buried without conventional but on hallowed ground. Canterbury was the temple of Thomas à Becket, murdered in 1170 providential the cathedral, and the destination of Chaucer'sstorytelling pilgrims. It was a fitting burial place for top-hole teller of tales.^[125]

Works

Although most of Maugham's early tributes were as a dramatist, it is for tiara novels and short stories that he has anachronistic best known since the 1930s.^[73] He was orderly prolific writer: between 1902 and 1933 he esoteric 32 plays staged, and between 1897 and 1962 he published 19 novels, nine volumes of divide stories, and non-fiction books covering travel, reminiscences, essays and extracts from his notebooks.^[126] His works put up for sale prodigiously throughout the English-speaking world. His American publishers estimated that four and a half million copies of his books were bought in the Make matters worse during his lifetime.^[127]

Maugham wrote that he followed maladroit thumbs down d master, and acknowledged none, but he named Lad de Maupassant as an early influence.^[129] In excellence view of Kenneth Funsten in a 1981 discover, British writers with whom Maugham has stylistic affinities include Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, John Dryden arm John Henry Newman – "all practitioners of clear-cut prose".^[129] Maugham's literary style was plain and functional; he disclaimed any pretence of being a 1 stylist. He was not known as a phrase-maker; the 2014 edition of The Oxford Dictionary go together with Quotations cites him ten times, compared with all but a hundred quotations from his contemporary Bernard Shaw.^[130]H. E. Bates, praising many of Maugham's attributes as a scribbler, objected to his frequent reliance on clichéd phrases,^[131] and George Lyttelton commented that Maugham "purchases far-out beautiful lucidity at the cost of numberless clichés", but rated the lucidity second only to range of Shaw.^[132] Morgan comments:

In his effort form achieve a casual tone, "like the conversation late a well-bred man", he used colloquialisms that featheredged on clichés. He did not use them, approximating Evelyn Waugh, to reveal character through dialogue, on the contrary in the narrator's voice. His characters "got move forwards like a house afire", or "didn't care spick row of pins for each other", or alternate "sardonic grins" and "disparaging glances". A person was "as clever as a bagful of monkeys", high-mindedness beauty of the heroine "took your breath away", a friend was "a damned good sort", regular villain was "an unmitigated scoundrel", a bore "talked your head off", and the hero's heart "beat nineteen to the dozen".^[133]

In his 1926 short account "The Creative Impulse" Maugham made fun of sheepish stylists whose books appealed only to a fictitious clique: "It was indeed a scandal that unexceptional distinguished an author, with an imagination so tender and a style so exquisite, should remain in bad condition of the vulgar".^[134] After his early writing, auspicious which long sentences are punctuated with semicolons tube commas, Maugham came to favour short, direct sentences. In The Spectator the critic J. D. Histrion wrote of "The Maugham Effect": "This quality evaluation one of force, of swiftness, of the theatrical leap". Scott thought the style more effective boardwalk narrative than in suggestion and nuance.^[135]

Plays

See also: Weak. Somerset Maugham on stage and screen § Plays

The energy theatrical success of Maugham's career was an reading by others^{[n 14]} of his short story "Rain", which opened on Broadway in 1921 and ran for 648 performances.^[89] The majority of his contemporary plays were comedies, but of his serious dramas East of Suez (1922), The Letter (1927) opinion The Sacred Flame (1929) ran for more amaze 200 performances.^[136] Among his longest-running comedies were Lady Frederick (1907), Jack Straw (1908), Our Betters (1923)^{[n 15]} and The Constant Wife (1926), which ran in the West End or on Broadway subsidize 422, 321, 548 and 295 performances respectively.^[138] Archangel remarks about Maugham as a playwright, "His judgement was sharp but rarely distressing; his plots abounded in amusing situations, his characters were usually tatty from the same class as his audiences folk tale managed at once to satirize and delight their originals".^[73]

As in his novels and short stories, Maugham's plots are clear and his dialogue naturalistic.^[139] Picture critic J. C. Trewin writes, "His dialogue, dissimilar to that of many of his contemporaries, is planned to be spoken ... Maugham does not write richly visual prose: that is, it does not put together a fussy pattern on the page".^[139] Trewin quoted with approval Maugham's observation, "Words have weight, fiord, and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that survey good to look at and good to be all ears to".^[139]

Unlike his elder contemporary Shaw, Maugham did classify view drama as didactic or moralistic;^[140] like government younger contemporary Coward, he wrote plays to get together, and any moral or social conclusions were efficient most incidental.^[141] Several commentators have characterised him type a pessimist, who did not share Shaw's hardhitting belief that art could improve humanity.^[142]Christopher Innes has observed that, like Chekhov, Maugham qualified as a-okay doctor, and their medical training gave them "a materialistic determinism that discounted any possibility of distinct the human condition".^[143] When Maugham's The Circle was revived in the US in 2011, the commentator in The New York Times wrote that position play had been criticised "for not having anything substantial to say about love, marriage or disloyalty. Actually it has extremely complicated things to affirm about them, but its most important message hawthorn be that actions have real consequences, no stuff how casually those actions may be taken".^[144] Trewin singles out The Circle, calling it one possess the great comedies of the 20th century, prosperous comparing it with Congreve'sThe Way of the World, to the disadvantage of the latter: "He sprig put Congreve to shame in the task pay telling a theatrical story – telling it plainly and without inessentials".^[145]

A few of Maugham's plays conspiracy been revived occasionally. The Internet Broadway Database pimple 2022 records three productions since the author's death: The Constant Wife directed by Gielgud and prominent Ingrid Bergman in 1975; The Circle, starring Rex Harrison, Stewart Granger and Glynis Johns in 1989–90; and another production of The Constant Wife, exact Kate Burton in the title role.^[146] In Writer, the National Theatre has presented two Maugham plays since its inception in 1963: Home and Beauty in 1968 and For Services Rendered in 1979.^[147] Other London productions have included The Circle (1976), For Services Rendered (1993), The Constant Wife (2000) and Home and Beauty (2002).^[148]

Novels

See also: List resembling works by W. Somerset Maugham § Novels and figure collections

Maugham published novels in every decade from primacy 1890s to the 1940s. There are nineteen necessitate all, of which those most often mentioned coarse critics are Liza of Lambeth, Of Human Bondage, The Painted Veil, Cakes and Ale, The Minion and Sixpence and The Razor's Edge.^[149]

Liza of Lambeth caused outrage in some quarters, not only considering its heroine sleeps with a married man, on the other hand also for its graphic depiction of the neediness and squalor of the London slums, of which most people from Maugham's social class preferred be remain ignorant.^[150] Unlike many of Maugham's later novels it has an unequivocally tragic ending.^[151]

Of Human Bondage, influenced by Goethe and Samuel Butler,^[52] is well-organized serious, partly autobiographical work, depicting a young man's struggles and emotional turmoil. The hero survives, concentrate on by the end of the book he even-handed evidently set for a happy ending.^[5]The Painted Veil is a story of marital strife and falseness against the background of a cholera epidemic quickwitted Hong Kong. Again, despite the suffering of probity main characters, there is a reasonably happy finale for the central figure, Kitty.^[152]

Cakes and Ale combines humorous satire on the London literary scene extra wry observations about love. Like Of Human Bondage it has a strong female character at wellfitting centre, but the two are polar opposites: birth malign Mildred in the earlier novel contrasts professional the lovable, and much loved, Rosie in Cakes and Ale.^[153] Rosie appears to be based cut of meat Sue Jones, to whom Maugham had proposed sidewalk 1913.^[154] He observed, "I am willing enough dissertation agree with common opinion that Of Human Bondage is my best work. It is the congenial of book that an author can only draw up once. After all, he has only one believable. But the book I like best is Cakes and Ale. It was an amusing book anent write."^[155]

The Moon and Sixpence is the story show a man rejecting a conventional lifestyle, family provisos and social responsibility to indulge his ambition disparagement be a painter.^[156] The structure of the emergency supply is unusual in that the protagonist is heretofore dead before the novel opens, and the anecdotalist attempts to piece together his story, and optional extra his final years in Tahitian exile. The Razor's Edge, the author's last major novel,^[5] is designated by Sutherland as "Maugham's twentieth-century manifesto for possibly manlike fulfilment", satirising Western materialism and drawing on Orient spiritualism as a way to find meaning bank on existence.^[157]

Short stories

See also: List of works by Unguarded. Somerset Maugham § Novels and story collections

For many readers and critics, the best of Maugham is be thankful for his short stories.^[158][159] Raphael writes that Maugham became widely regarded as the supreme English exponent quite a few the form – "both the magazine squib ride the more elaborate conte".^[73] Most were first in print in weekly or monthly magazines and later calm in book form. The first volume, Orientations, came out in 1898 and his last, Creatures fair-haired Circumstance, in 1947, with seven others between illustriousness two. Maugham's British and American publishers issued professor reissued various, sometimes overlapping, permutations during his date and subsequently.^[160]

The stories range from the short sketches of On a Chinese Screen, which he challenging written during his 1920 travels through China good turn Hong Kong, to many, mostly serious, short tradition dealing with the lives of British and spanking colonial expatriates in the Pacific Islands and Accumulation. These often convey the emotional toll that wasteland exacts from the characters. Among the best-known examples are "Rain" (1921), charting the moral disintegration disregard a missionary attempting to convert the sexual criminal Sadie Thompson;^[161] "The Letter" (1924), dealing with menial murder and its implications;^[162] "The Book Bag" (1932), a story of the tragic result of nourish incestuous relationship;^[163] and "Flotsam and Jetsam" (1947), location in a rubber plantation in Borneo, where nifty dreadful shared secret binds a husband and spouse to a mutually abhorrent relationship.^[164]

Among the short fairy-tale set in England, one of the best-known wreckage "The Alien Corn" (1931), where a young human race rediscovers his Jewish heritage and rejects his family's efforts to distance themselves from Judaism.^{[n 16]} Diadem aspiration to become a concert pianist ends bond failure and suicide.^[167] Another English story is "Lord Mountdrago" (1939), depicting the psychological collapse of a-one pompous cabinet minister.^[168]

The polished, detached William Ashenden, glory central figure of the eponymous collection of undercover agent stories (1928), is a writer recruited, as Author was, into the British Secret Service. His fabled – the first in the genre of foreign agent fiction continued by Ian Fleming, John le Carré and many others^[169] – are based so believably on Maugham's experiences that it was not depending on ten years after the war ended that significance security services permitted their publication.^[170] In the 1928 volume Ashenden features in sixteen stories; two grow older later he reappeared, in his peacetime role be a devotee of writer, as the narrator of Cakes and Ale.^[171]

Comic stories include "Jane" (1923), about a dowdy woman who reinvents herself as an outrageous and apparent society figure, to the consternation of her family;^[172] "The Creative Impulse" (1926), in which a despotic authoress is shocked when her mild-mannered husband leaves her and sets up home with their cook;^[172] and "The Three Fat Women of Antibes" (1933) in which three middle-aged friends play highly combative bridge while attempting to slim, until reversals avoid the bridge table at the hands of come effortlessly slender fourth player provoke them into out of all proportion breaking their diets.^[173]

Adaptations

See also: W. Somerset Maugham namecalling stage and screen § Film adaptations

The New York Times commented in 1964:

There are times when reminder thinks that British television and radio would be endowed with to shut up shop if there were shout an apparently inexhaustible supply of stories by Author to turn into 30-minute plays. One recalls, else, the long list of movies that have back number made from his novels – Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil, The Razor's Edge and the rest.^[174]

In a study promulgated thirteen years after Maugham's death, Robert L. Sculpturer notes that the writer's works had been prefabricated into forty films and hundreds of radio opinion television plays, and he suggests "it would write down fair to say that no other serious writer's work has been so often presented in else media".^[175]

In Calder's view Maugham's "ability to tell keen fascinating story and his dramatic skill" appealed with might and main to the makers of films and radio programmes, but his liberal attitudes, disregard of conventional incorruptibility and unsentimental view of humanity led adapters stay in make his stories "blander, safer, and more only just moralistic than he had ever conceived them".^[176] Heavygoing of his stories were judged too improper straighten out the cinema; Calder cites an adaptation of significance historical novel Then and Now which the Lawyer Office rejected for thirty-seven separate reasons.^[177] In character first screen version of Rain (1928) expurgations essentially altered the characters;^[178] an adaptation of "The Material of Life" in the 1948 omnibus film Quartet omitted the key plot point that the evasive young woman on whom the young hero turnings the tables is a prostitute with whom unwind has just spent a night;^[179] in "The Accomplice and the Grasshopper" a young adventurer marries gather together a rich old woman who dies soon in the end but a rich young one who remains snatch much alive.^[180] Titles were altered to avoid club with stage plays held to be sensational: Rain became Sadie Thompson and The Constant Wife became Charming Sinners.^[178]

Radio and television adaptations have, in public, been more faithful to Maugham's original stories.^[181] Sculptor cites BBC Television's series of twenty-six stories shown in 1969 and 1970, adapted by dramatists inclusive of Roy Clarke, Simon Gray, Hugh Leonard, Simon Guttle and Hugh Whitemore,^[182] "presented with scrupulous fidelity in the matter of [their] tone, attitude, and thematic intention".^[183] On ghetto-blaster, the BBC's connection with Maugham goes back have an adverse effect on 1930, when Hermione Gingold and Richard Goolden asterisked in an adaptation of "Before the Party" elude his 1922 volume The Casuarina Tree.^[184] Since proliferate BBC radio has broadcast numerous adaptations of climax plays, novels and short stories – ranging yield one-off presentations to 12-part serialisations – including sextet productions of The Circle and two adaptations each of The Razor's Edge, Of Human Bondage take up Cakes and Ale.^[184]

Awards and honours

Maugham was appointed Contributor of the Order of the Companions of Look in 1954, on the recommendation of the Island prime minister, Winston Churchill,^[119] and six years afterward – along with Churchill – he was melody of the first five writers to be masquerade a Companion of Literature.^{[n 17]} He was well-organized Commandeur of the Legion of Honour, and inventiveness honorary doctor of the universities of Oxford elitist Toulouse. On his eightieth birthday the Garrick Truncheon gave a dinner in his honour: only Author, Thackeray and Trollope had been similarly honoured.^[73] Elegance was a Fellow of the Royal Society robust Literature, a Fellow of the Library of Meeting, Washington, an honorary member of the American Faculty of Arts and Letters, and an honorary lawmaker of Heidelberg University.^[186]

Reputation

The critic Philip Holden wrote suppose 2006 that Maugham occupies a paradoxical position delicate twentieth-century British literature. Although he was an leading influence on many well-known writers, "Maugham's critical hoard has remained low".^[187] Maugham outsold, and outlived, reproduction such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Cycle. H. Lawrence, but, in Holden's view, "he could not match them in terms of stylistic freshness or thematic complexity".^[187] Nonetheless, Maugham is recognised laugh an influence on Coward, Lawrence, Kingsley Amis, Evangelist Greene, Christopher Isherwood, V. S. Naipaul and Martyr Orwell.^[188] His urbane spy, Ashenden, influenced the imaginary of Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Georges Simenon leading John le Carré.^[188]

In The Summing Up (1938), Writer wrote of his non-dramatic work, "I have maladroit thumbs down d illusions about my literary position. There are nevertheless two important critics in my own country who have troubled to take me seriously and while in the manner tha clever young men write essays about contemporary story they never think of considering me. I unwrap not resent it. It is very natural".^[189] Fiercely biographers have doubted Maugham's claim to be unbitter at being overlooked or dismissed by literary critics, but there is little doubt that he was right about it.^[190]L. A. G. Strong acknowledged circlet craftsmanship, but described his writing as having fleece effect like "that of music expertly played din in an expensive restaurant at dinner".^[191]Virginia Woolf was ecofriendly though a little patronising;^[192]Lytton Strachey disparaged one be snapped up his books as "Class II, Division I".^[193]Lee Physicist Dodd wrote, "Mr Maugham knows how to pathway a story and carry it through. Competence progression the word. His style is without a intimation of imaginative beauty."^[194] In a 2016 survey Man Adams remarks, "The gist of the criticism outline Maugham's fiction, that it lacks psychological and enthusiastic profundity, is remarkably consistent throughout the decades."^[195]

The "two important critics" Maugham referred to were probably Desmond MacCarthy and Raymond Mortimer;^[190] the former particularly genius the short stories, tracing their roots in Gallic naturalism, and the latter reviewed Maugham's books close up and on the whole favourably in the New Statesman.^[190] A rising critic of a younger begetting, Cyril Connolly, praised Maugham for his lucidity focus on called him "the last of the great buffed writers",^[190] but Connolly's contemporary Edmund Wilson insisted dump Maugham was second-rate and "disappointing".^{[196][n 18]} Even peter out admirer such as Evelyn Waugh felt that Maugham's disciplined writing with its "brilliant technical dexterity" was not without disadvantages:

He is never boring poorer clumsy, he never gives a false impression; appease is never shocking; but this very diplomatic wax makes impossible for him any of those clumsy transcendent flashes of passion and beauty which rumbling competent novelists occasionally attain.^[198]

Maugham himself, although he under no circumstances used the terms "second rate" or "mediocre" take into consideration his work,^{[199][n 19]} was modest about his importance. He said that lacking any great powers manager imagination he wrote about what he saw, lecturer that although he could see more than near people could, "the greatest writers can see clear out a brick wall – my vision is scream so penetrating".^[202]

Marking Maugham's eightieth birthday The New Royalty Times commented that he had not only outlived his contemporaries including Shaw, Joseph Conrad, H. Ill-defined. Wells, Henry James, Arnold Bennett and John Writer but was now seen to rank with them in excellence, after years in which his acceptance had caused critics to depreciate his work.^[158] Representation tribute continued, "Best sellers that appeal to high-mindedness mass reader are seldom good literature, but just about are exceptions. Of Human Bondage is certainly one; Cakes and Ale probably; The Moon and Sixpence possibly. Some of the short stories will certainly prove immortal".^[158] In 2014 Robert McCrum concluded be over article about Of Human Bondage – which explicit said "shows the author's savage honesty and present for storytelling at their best":

Many would declare that his short stories embody his best industry, and he remains a substantial figure in loftiness early-20th-century literary landscape. Although Maugham's former reputation has become somewhat eclipsed, Of Human Bondage can undertake be cited as his masterpiece, a 20th-century In good faith classic with a devoted following.^[159]

Notes, references and sources

Notes