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.
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:
It has happened to me from time to time to run into some person of taste who tells me that I ought to take Somerset Maugham seriously, yet I have never been able to convince myself that he was anything but second-rate. . . . Mr. Maugham, I cannot help feeling, is not, in the sense of “having the métier,” really a writer at all.
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.
