The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings
| The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings | |
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| Category: Biography | |
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Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
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| Summary: A biography of the prolific novelist, short story writer and dramatist, who was at the height of his career perhaps the most successful and widely read author of his generation, yet had good reasons for keeping his private life secret. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: | Date: July 2010 |
| Publisher: 624 | |
| ISBN: 978-0719565557 | |
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These days, W. Somerset Maugham seems to be something of an anachronism. In his heyday, for much of a career which lasted from the end of the Victorian era to the 1950s, he was one of the most successful and widely read of all British writers, with his novels, short stories and plays spawning more film adaptations than any other author. Yet over the last thirty years or so he seems to have slipped from favour, as if his preoccupation with the Edwardian England in which he grew up and his end-of-empire settings are deeply embedded in an age we would rather forget. Moreover, as this very comprehensive biography demonstrates, he was not the most pleasant of individuals. The unhappy child, orphaned by the time he was ten, afflicted with a lifelong stammer and brought up by an aunt and uncle who showed him no affection, grew up to lead a long and unhappy life.
Marriage to an actress with whom he was in love for a while might have been the making of him, but she rejected him in favour of somebody else. An affair with Syrie Wellcome, who was estranged from her husband, led to the birth of a daughter, Lisa, a messy divorce for Syrie, and her threatening to expose Maugham’s lifestyle and the names of his male lovers if he did not marry her. After this inauspicious beginning the marriage not surprisingly was a disaster, and a few years later she made the same threats if he did not divorce her. By the time she was out of his life he had formed a more congenial, if similarly tempestuous, personal partnership with Gerald Haxton, an inveterate drinker and gambler almost young enough to be his son. After Haxton’s death from tuberculosis, the gap was filled by the equally difficult Alan Searle.
With Oscar Wilde’s devastating fall from grace an ever-present warning, Maugham was obliged to keep his personal life as secret as possible. His friends naturally knew about it, and at one stage his elder brother Frederick, a recently knighted High Court judge, was requested by Scotland Yard to warn him that if he did not curtail his behaviour in London he would almost certainly be arrested. He had the good sense to spend much of his life in France, America or elsewhere, though living abroad seemingly had no impact on his success as an author. Although he had studied as a medical student, writing was always his first love. His first novel, ‘Liza of Lambeth’ (after whom his daughter was named), was published in 1897, and within a few years his success as a novelist was being eclipsed by that as a dramatist. In 1908 he had four plays running simultaneously in the West End, an achievement which would be unbroken for a generation.
Selina Hastings’s comprehensive and lengthy yet never dull biography conveys some sympathy for the man while never seeking to excuse his boorish manners. He was certainly unfortunate in his choice of those with whom he spent much of his life, and his estrangement from Lisa in his final years seems to have been largely the fault of the greedy, mischievous Searle, anxious to exploit Maugham’s increasing dementia in his last years. In fact the final pages tell a sad story of an embittered old man, immortalised in the eyes of the world by Graham Sutherland’s frequently reproduced, very unflattering portrait of a craggy, miserable-looking, hollow-eyed face. Persuaded by Searle in his twilight years to write a final rambling memoir, he went into print attacking his late ex-wife with such venom that many of his friends and supporters were alienated. According to one previously sympathetic critic he mined his own monument; and blew it up. On a subsequent visit to London, he was conspicuously cut dead when he visited his club.
Devastated, he returned to France and never set foot in England again.
This is a fascinating read, but a sad one. Maugham may have been very successful and wealthy, but his extravagant lifestyle and the company he kept brought him no lasting pleasure. In an interview published to mark his ninetieth birthday, he admitted that he longed for death; it seems to me to offer me the final and absolute freedom. A little less than two years later he was taken to hospital after a fall at his home, developed pneumonia, and was granted his last wish. As the last sentence of the last chapter reminds us, Maugham was the great teller of tales. Whether future generations will rediscover him and whether his reputation as a writer will ever recover remains to be seen, but in the meantime, this biography is a fitting memorial to a man who was often his own worst enemy.
For other biographies of near-contemporary authors, you might like to read Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin, or The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle by Russell Miller.
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