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Maugham, Somerset

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 7 months ago
Source: Wikipedia

William Somerset Maugham (January 25, 1874 Paris, France – December 16, 1965 Nice, France) was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer, reputedly the highest paid author of the 1930s. He was born to English parents living in France, who arranged in advance for their child's birth to occur at the British embassy in Paris, so that it would be technically true - as a legal nicety, despite geography - that he was born in Britain.

Despite his origins, he spoke only French until he was orphaned at eleven and was sent to live with his surviving family in Whitstable, England - he became a pupil at The King's School, Canterbury. Maugham wrote comedies, psychological novels and spy stories.

Prior to his literary success, he studied literature and philosophy at Heidelberg University, then medicine in London, qualifying from St. Thomas' hospital in 1897. During World War I, Maugham served as a spy for MI6, being sent to Russia with the mission of preventing the Russian Revolution by keeping the Mensheviks in power, after a stint working as a British Red Cross ambulance driver, in which capacity he met Gerald Haxton, a young San Franciscan who would become Maugham's lover until Haxton's death in 1944. Maugham subsequently lived with Alan Searle.

 

In 1917, in New Jersey, Maugham married his mistress, Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo, a daughter of orphanage founder Thomas John Barnardo and former wife of American-born English pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome. (She became celebrated as Syrie Maugham, a noted interior decorator who popularized the all-white room in the 1920s.) They divorced in 1928 after a tempestuous marriage that may have been complicated by Maugham's relationship with Haxton, but had one daughter, Elizabeth 'Liza' Mary Maugham (1915-1998).

 

Maugham 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 of his books) and later in the South. While in the US, he was encouraged by the British government to make patriotic speeches to impel the US to help Britain, if not get involved in the war effort. After the war, he moved back to England, and then to his villa in France, where he lived - except for his frequent and long travels - until his death.

 

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. He enjoyed travelling widely, particularly to East Asia, the Pacific Islands and Mexico, often accompanied by Haxton (even while he was married). In 1926 he bought Villa Mauresque on twelve acres at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, from a Catholic bishop who prefered to live and play in Algeria - it 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. Despite his triumphs, he never attracted the respect of the critics or of his peers, and his own opinion of his abilities remained low, to the extent of describing himself towards the end of his career as "in the very first row of the second-raters".

 

Maugham's claim to inclusion among crime and detection writers is due mainly to his book of connected short stories Ashenden: or The British Agent (1928), about a British spy in an unidentified country during WWI. The book's atmosphere of desperation and futility, of blind obedience to half-understood commands and hopeless causes, gives it the same feeling achieved much later by the hard-boiled noir fiction of US writers in the 1930s. It was chosen as one of the Haycraft-Queen cornerstones.

 

Mike Grost on Somerset Maugham

 

Maugham's crime tales, "Before the Party" (1922), "The Letter" (1924), "Footprints in the Jungle" (1927), "The Book-Bag", are apparently the only Maugham tales largely based on real life events, whereas most of his stories are purely fictional, and completely made up out of his head. They are based on real cases Maugham heard about while traveling in South East Asia. The excellent "Footprints in the Jungle" (1927) is the only full detective story Maugham ever wrote; it shows the self-referential quality of so many detective tales, with comments on The Mystery as a genre embedded right in the story. Neither such self-referential authors as Doyle nor Carr could have done this better! Maugham was a great admirer of detective fiction, and did not adopt the condescending attitude towards it of such lesser lights as Edmund Wilson. "Footprints" appeared in January 1927; later in 1927 Maugham's tales about the secret agent Ashenden appeared in magazines, being published in book form a year later. Ashenden's adventures are notable for the sober realism they brought to the spy tale, after years of melodramatic adventure tales by other spy writers. They were written at a time when the influence of Freeman Wills Crofts and his realistic police stories were at their peak; such works might have helped inspire Maugham to a similar approach to the spy tale.

 

 

Bibliography

The Casuarina Tree (1926) (aka The Letter: Stories of Crime)

Ashenden: or The British Agent (1928)

Ah King: Six Stories (1933)

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