Maugham’s the Word

Once upon a time a serious novelist could be very, very popular. Then something came unstuck, and now the appearance of a novel on the bestseller list is generally taken by highbrows as proof of its artistic frivolity. They’ve got a point: You don’t have to spend more than a minute or two in an airport bookstore to be stupefied by the sheer crappiness of today’s popular fiction. But it took a long time to get from David Copperfield to The Da Vinci Code, and along the way a number of writers whose distinction used to be taken for granted got left out in the cold.

One of them was W. Somerset Maugham, who was both greatly admired and hugely successful throughout much of his long career, first as a playwright and then as the author of novels and short stories that won him the praise of critics and colleagues ranging from George Orwell to Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser described Of Human Bondage, the book that put Maugham on the map in 1915, as “a novel of the utmost importance.” For many years after that, his critical standing seemed as solid as the pound sterling. At the same time, he was also one of the top-selling authors of the 20th century, and many of his novels, plays, and stories were later turned into big-budget movies that starred the likes of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Greta Garbo, John Gielgud, Leslie Howard, Gene Kelly, Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, and George Sanders. In one of them, The Razor’s Edge, Maugham himself was played by Herbert Marshall, and starting in 1948 he made on-camera appearances as the urbane host of a well-received series of British anthology films based on his short stories.

In time, Maugham made enough money from his writings to buy a villa on the French Riviera, fill it with a choice collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, and travel wherever and whenever he liked in search of material for his work. Such good fortune never goes unforgiven, and by the ’30s he found himself on the receiving end of a string of critical onslaughts, the most brutal of which was a 1946 New Yorker essay in which Edmund Wilson gave him the shortest possible shrift:

Wilson was then one of America’s most influential literary tastemakers, and the fact (unknown to his readers) that he had not read any of Maugham’s major novels did not diminish the deadly effectiveness of his assault on the man who wrote them. By the time of his death in 1965, Maugham had become a kind of cultural unperson, and, notwithstanding the subsequent rehabilitative efforts of such devotees as Joseph Epstein, his reputation has yet to recover from the slings and arrows of the critics who brought him low. 

Now Selina Hastings, a British literary journalist whose previous books include biographies of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, is seeking to persuade a new generation of readers that Somerset Maugham deserves a second chance. To this end she has written a biography of Maugham, the first one to be based on his hitherto-inaccessible correspondence. It contains information that has been ballyhooed as scandalous in the British tabloids, though most of the dirtiest dirt had already been published (albeit with less detail) in Ted Morgan’s Maugham, which came out three decades ago. But Hastings is refreshingly disinclined to pass on rumor in the guise of fact, and while The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham is no masterpiece of the biographer’s art—Hastings lacks flair and isn’t much of a critic—it tells you just about everything you could possibly want to know about its subject, including a good many things that he would have blanched to see in print.

It long ago ceased to be a secret that Maugham had plenty to hide. Not only was he an avidly practicing homosexual at a time when the British police unhesitatingly clapped such folk in jail with alarming regularity, but he was what we have since learned to call a sexual tourist, a man who traveled far and wide to gratify his appetites, which extended, it appears, to having sex with teenage boys. “I do not believe,” he wrote in 1935, “that there is any man, who if the whole truth were known of him would not seem a monster of depravity.” To learn from Hastings that he believed “the most memorable sexual experience of his life” to have been “a moonlit night on a sampan with a boy in Malaya” may cause many modern-day readers to regard him as exactly that.

Such confidences, however, were not for the hoi polloi. Maugham never wrote about his sexuality for publication save with the utmost discretion. On the other hand, virtually every other aspect of his life sooner or later made its way into his work, and the more one learns about him, the sadder he seems. Orphaned at 10 and raised by a philistine country vicar, he was on the short side and sensitive about it, believed himself to be physically unattractive, and had a stammer that he was never able to bring fully under control. After his writing made him rich, he found it hard to believe that anyone could appreciate him, save for his money. 

“I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me,” he wrote in The Summing Up, his 1938 memoir, “and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed.”

That such a creature should have longed to marry and lead a life of Vicwardian respectability is anything but surprising, given the high price that he could easily have paid for doing otherwise. In time he acquired a wife and sired a daughter, but Maugham was incapable of suppressing his sexual nature, and his short-lived marriage to a greedy divorcée brought him much misery. Nor was his longest-lasting emotional tie, to a ne’er-do-well American named Gerald Haxton, any more successful, though Maugham adored his dissolute companion and was devastated when he died. The truth was that he was not cut out for any kind of intimate relationship—a fact of which he was all too aware.

Maugham was no less realistic about the value of his own work. “I know just where I stand: in the very front row of the second-raters,” he claimed. Yet he made such resourceful fictional use of his complex and eventful private life as to overcome his natural limitations to a degree almost without precedent in English literature. On occasion he even managed to lift himself by sheer force of will into the first rank: Cakes and Ale, the ruefully funny 1930 novel in which he told of his youthful attachment to a promiscuous but lovable actress, is masterly, as are a dozen or so of his neatly turned, lethally cynical short stories. He was also a gifted autobiographer and travel writer, and The Summing Up, his unexpectedly candid memoir, is one of the best things he ever wrote.

These, however, are all small-scale achievements, by no means to be despised—Cakes and Ale is one of the finest comic novels of the 20th century—but limited in their scope and significance. None of Maugham’s other novels is as impressive as Cakes and Ale, though some of them, especially The Razor’s Edge and The Narrow Corner, contain good things. Of Human Bondage, the Bildungsroman of his unhappy childhood and youth that is his most ambitious and explicitly autobiographical work of fiction, is lumpily episodic, pedestrian in style, and disfigured by a shy-making streak of self-pity that he later learned to keep out of sight. Novelettish clichés (“He leaned over her, and his heart went pit-a-pat”) are sprinkled throughout his oeuvre, just as his lesser short stories hinge on “surprises” likely to strike contemporary readers as contrived.

You won’t come away from The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham suspecting any of this. Hastings is a true believer, and the weakest passages in her book are the ones in which she endeavors to persuade the reader that Maugham was a better writer than he really was. These mostly take the form of enthusiastic assertion: Of Human Bondage is “extraordinarily compelling” and “a major achievement,” The Trembling of a Leaf “triumphant,” The Razor’s Edge “supremely accomplished.” Even those who, like me, regard Maugham as underrated may feel that Hastings is overegging the pudding.

More to the point is her description of Hugh Walpole, a once popular novelist whom Maugham mercilessly guyed in Cakes and Ale and to whom Hastings refers in passing as “possessed of the fatal facility of the second-rate.” Much the same thing might be said of Maugham himself. Too many of his novels and stories are little better than smooth hackwork churned out to keep his golden pot boiling. He liked to speak of money as “a sixth sense without which you could not make the most of the other five.” It’s a good line, but not the best possible reason to write literary fiction.

At one point Hastings quotes Evelyn Waugh as having praised Maugham’s “supreme adroitness and ease. .  .  . I do not know of any living writer who seems to have his work so much under control.” But she neglects to cite the rest of the passage, in which Waugh went on to say that he regarded this latter aspect of Maugham’s work as “both a triumph and a limitation,” explaining that “this very diplomatic polish makes impossible for him any of those sudden transcendent flashes of passion and beauty which less competent novelists occasionally attain.” Maugham himself knew that his writing lacked this latter quality, and he seems to have felt that his sexuality was at fault. In Don Fernando, a 1935 volume of reflections on the Spanish national character that is one of his least-appreciated books, he made the following observations apropos of El Greco, whom he took to be homosexual:

Maugham, who on another occasion described himself as having “small power of imagination,” undoubtedly had himself in mind as well.

What made Maugham’s work so popular, and what makes the best of it readable to this day, is not his prose style or his philosophical interests but his consummate grasp of the insufficiently respected art of plot-spinning. Not only did he know a good story when he heard one, but he knew how to turn an intriguing dinner-table anecdote into a sharply pointed tale of human fallibility. I learned how good his plots were when I turned one of his stage plays, The Letter, into an opera libretto. The language of the play was clankingly prosy—so much so that I had to rewrite virtually all of it. But the plot, which is based on the real-life story of a “respectable” married woman in British Malaya who murdered her lover, then claimed that he tried to rape her, was so well made that I left it almost entirely intact.

What I learned from working on The Letter was that Maugham is, above all, a writer of situation and event, one whose characters sometimes say interesting things but rarely say them in a memorable way. Small wonder that Dreiser, the worst stylist ever to produce major novels, esteemed him. Like Dreiser, Maugham is a writer who tells us what happened, and the language in which he tells it is always of secondary interest to the occurrence itself. It stands to reason, then, that his journalist’s curiosity and unusually wide experience (he trained as a physician before becoming a full-time writer and served as a British spy during World War I) would have worked to his benefit.

One of his stories is actually called “Raw Material,” and he spent much of his adult life trolling the world for characters and anecdotes that he could weave into plots. “I have taken living people and put them into the situations, tragic or comic, that their characters suggested,” he admitted in The Summing Up. “I might well say that they invented their own stories.”

Not surprisingly, he is best when most straightforward, and the more simply he writes, the easier it is to see the glints of wit in his plain-Jane prose. (“To write simply,” he observed in Don Fernando, “is as difficult as to be good.”) The pose of cool detachment from the follies of his fellow men that he cultivated after getting Of Human Bondage out of his system rarely failed to serve him well, never more so than in Cakes and Ale, whose first sentence, no matter how many times you read it, always takes you by delighted surprise: “I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, and it’s important, the matter is more often important to him than to you.”

Was he a great writer? Hardly. But to have produced Cakes and Ale, The Summing Up, Don Fernando, and such stories as “The Alien Corn,” “The Colonel’s Lady,” “The Outstation,” “The Three Fat Women of Antibes,” “Sanatorium,” and “The Yellow Streak” (to name only a few) is no small achievement, at least not by the standards of mere mortals. “I have never pretended to be anything but a storyteller,” he said. Perhaps not, but it is that very lack of pretension that makes him so attractive, and though I wouldn’t trade him for Waugh or Joseph Conrad or Henry James, we could definitely use a few more such honest craftsmen on our bestseller lists.

Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and chief culture critic of Commentary, wrote the libretto for The Letter, an opera by Paul Moravec based on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1927 play that was premiered last summer by the Santa Fe Opera.