Maugham’s the Word

Leslie Howard, Bette Davis in ‘Of Human Bondage,’ 1934

Courtesy Everett Collection

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings
Random House, 640 pp., $35 

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.