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毛姆传：毛姆的秘密生活
威廉·萨默塞特·毛姆，生于1874年，卒于1965年，他是英国历史上最富盛名的作家之一，也是二十世纪“拥有最多读者的作家”。 他的小说《人性的枷锁》、《刀锋》、《月亮与六便士》、《寻欢作乐》等多次再版且长销不衰，在今时今日仍然不断被新的读者阅读、谈论，成为了经得起时间考验的经典。
比起毛姆的小说，毛姆本人的一生可能更为跌宕、精彩、富有传奇性。毛姆生于法国巴黎，八岁丧母，十岁丧父，后弃医从文，处女作《兰贝斯的丽莎》出版后，历经十年磨练，在近半个世纪的时间里引领戏剧与小说界之风骚。传记作家特德·摩根这样评价毛姆：“毛姆是下述一切的总和：一个孤僻的孩子，一个医学院的学生，一个富有创造力的小说家，一个巴黎的放荡不羁的浪子，一个成功的伦敦西区戏剧家，一个英国社会名流，一个一战时在弗兰德斯前线的救护车驾驶员，一个潜入俄国工作的英国间谍，一个同性恋者，一个跟别人的妻子私通的丈夫，一个当代名人沙龙的殷勤主人，一个二战时的宣传家，一个自狄更斯以来拥有最多读者的小说家，一个靠细胞组织疗法保持活力的传奇人物，和一个企图不让女儿继承财产而收养他的情人秘书的固执老头子。”事业成功为毛姆带来名望与财富的同时，争议与毁谤也如影随形。难怪有人说，“如果有人能将毛姆的一生写出来，那将比他的小说精彩一百倍。”
此本《毛姆传》的出版了却了无数毛姆迷的夙愿。此本传记按时间先后顺序将毛姆的人生故事与创作经历一一道来，资料翔实，引据可靠，充满文学性与趣味性。本书更着眼于“私密”二字，向读者揭示毛姆不为人知的方方面面——成长经历、感情纠葛、家庭矛盾、隐秘情史、创作心路，他与其他名作家间的恩怨纠缠也有颇多涉及。本书对于不了解毛姆的读者是一个全面有趣的引介，对于喜欢毛姆作品的粉丝更是不可错过的阅读盛宴。
比起毛姆的小说，毛姆本人的一生可能更为跌宕、精彩、富有传奇性。毛姆生于法国巴黎，八岁丧母，十岁丧父，后弃医从文，处女作《兰贝斯的丽莎》出版后，历经十年磨练，在近半个世纪的时间里引领戏剧与小说界之风骚。传记作家特德·摩根这样评价毛姆：“毛姆是下述一切的总和：一个孤僻的孩子，一个医学院的学生，一个富有创造力的小说家，一个巴黎的放荡不羁的浪子，一个成功的伦敦西区戏剧家，一个英国社会名流，一个一战时在弗兰德斯前线的救护车驾驶员，一个潜入俄国工作的英国间谍，一个同性恋者，一个跟别人的妻子私通的丈夫，一个当代名人沙龙的殷勤主人，一个二战时的宣传家，一个自狄更斯以来拥有最多读者的小说家，一个靠细胞组织疗法保持活力的传奇人物，和一个企图不让女儿继承财产而收养他的情人秘书的固执老头子。”事业成功为毛姆带来名望与财富的同时，争议与毁谤也如影随形。难怪有人说，“如果有人能将毛姆的一生写出来，那将比他的小说精彩一百倍。”
此本《毛姆传》的出版了却了无数毛姆迷的夙愿。此本传记按时间先后顺序将毛姆的人生故事与创作经历一一道来，资料翔实，引据可靠，充满文学性与趣味性。本书更着眼于“私密”二字，向读者揭示毛姆不为人知的方方面面——成长经历、感情纠葛、家庭矛盾、隐秘情史、创作心路，他与其他名作家间的恩怨纠缠也有颇多涉及。本书对于不了解毛姆的读者是一个全面有趣的引介，对于喜欢毛姆作品的粉丝更是不可错过的阅读盛宴。
472 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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About the author
Selina Shirley Hastings
36 books32 followersLady Selina Shirley Hastings is a British journalist, author and biographer.
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August 3, 2025
‘I am a made writer,’ Somerset Maugham said near the end of his life, meaning it wasn’t a skill that came naturally to him. ‘I do not write as I want to; I write as I can.’
Fortunate for him, then, that how he could write was so extraordinarily profitable. Although he’s only really remembered for a couple of specific novels now (people usually plump for Of Human Bondage or The Moon and Sixpence), in his lifetime he was just about the most famous writer in English. Early in his career he achieved the staggering feat of having four plays running in the West End at the same time, and he went on to have more works adapted for film than any other writer in the language.
So successful was he as a playwright, that at one point he gave up novels altogether:
Luckily for the biographer, his long life was full of changes of mind, and also full of secrets. He worked in intelligence in both world wars, and as for his love life, it was a complete mess most of the time. ‘I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer,’ he said in old age – ‘whereas really it was the other way round.’ He was, according to Selina Hastings, ‘magnetically attractive to both sexes as a young man’, and he took full advantage of it – though it was clear fairly early on that he had a type, and the type was young, rough, and badly-behaved, which would cause no little disturbance to the other parts of his life.
He made one terrible mistake, which was marrying the well-connected Syrie Wellcome, née Barnardo (daughter of the founder of Barnardo’s charity, and divorcée of the pharmaceuticals magnate). Desperately in love with him and aware that he was more indifferent, she secretly stopped using birth control and got herself pregnant, forcing him to marry her to preserve appearances. It was a relationship that made the rest of both of their lives fairly miserable, to say nothing of how traumatised their poor daughter Liza was.
In practice, Maugham spent a lot of his time travelling without his wife, in the company of a ‘secretary’ – a series of long-term male partners, typically twenty years younger than him and with a facility for generating social interaction that Maugham, with his debilitating stammer, felt he did not possess. As a writer, that became his MO: take a long trip abroad (to the South Seas, or Malaya, or Japan), chat to all the colonial administrators and their families there, and then write bitterly hilarious stories about how small-minded/racist/sexually repressed they all were.
It was a formula that worked well, and indeed he was regarded by many critics as a kind of British Maupassant. His own secret love affairs made him especially sensitive to the secrets of others, and his work, in Hastings’s account, adds up to a kind of chronicle of sexual dominance and submission – on an emotional level, anyway – often told through cynical and uncensorious revelations about adultery, incest and other misdemeanours. He developed a narrative voice that was very easy to read – a character close to Maugham himself, conversational, entirely unshockable, a man of the world.
In real life, despite his voracious appetites, he could seem curiously sheltered:
Sex, Maugham said privately, was ‘the keenest pleasure to which the body is susceptible’, and he was still active well into his eighties, not only with his partner Alan Searle but ‘with boys brought by Searle to the villa; he saw sex as one of the physical appetites it was healthy to indulge,’ as he told friends. This ‘villa’ was a big pile on the French Riviera where he ended up living a life of considerable comfort, regularly visited by pals like Noel Coward, Winston Churchill, HG Wells, Rebecca West, Charlie Chaplin, Hugh Walpole, the Duke of Windsor, people like that. You know, the usual.
That’s one reason, perhaps, why he never quite had street cred as a writer – the Bloomsbury group in particular were not fans.
But another reason is just that the world changed. The end of Empire (which Maugham foresaw with approval) meant that there was no longer much interest in reading about frustrated memsahibs in the jungle and bored circuit officials. There’s still a lot to learn from his writing though – and, it becomes abundantly clear, from his life too. Hastings tells the story brilliantly, with an eye for anecdotal detail and prurient revelation that almost matches her subject. Maugham, a secretive man, would have been appalled: for the rest of us, this is one of the best literary biographies out there.
Fortunate for him, then, that how he could write was so extraordinarily profitable. Although he’s only really remembered for a couple of specific novels now (people usually plump for Of Human Bondage or The Moon and Sixpence), in his lifetime he was just about the most famous writer in English. Early in his career he achieved the staggering feat of having four plays running in the West End at the same time, and he went on to have more works adapted for film than any other writer in the language.
So successful was he as a playwright, that at one point he gave up novels altogether:
I happened to look up and saw the clouds lit by the setting sun. I paused to look at the lovely sight and I thought to myself: Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it.
Luckily for the biographer, his long life was full of changes of mind, and also full of secrets. He worked in intelligence in both world wars, and as for his love life, it was a complete mess most of the time. ‘I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer,’ he said in old age – ‘whereas really it was the other way round.’ He was, according to Selina Hastings, ‘magnetically attractive to both sexes as a young man’, and he took full advantage of it – though it was clear fairly early on that he had a type, and the type was young, rough, and badly-behaved, which would cause no little disturbance to the other parts of his life.
He made one terrible mistake, which was marrying the well-connected Syrie Wellcome, née Barnardo (daughter of the founder of Barnardo’s charity, and divorcée of the pharmaceuticals magnate). Desperately in love with him and aware that he was more indifferent, she secretly stopped using birth control and got herself pregnant, forcing him to marry her to preserve appearances. It was a relationship that made the rest of both of their lives fairly miserable, to say nothing of how traumatised their poor daughter Liza was.
In practice, Maugham spent a lot of his time travelling without his wife, in the company of a ‘secretary’ – a series of long-term male partners, typically twenty years younger than him and with a facility for generating social interaction that Maugham, with his debilitating stammer, felt he did not possess. As a writer, that became his MO: take a long trip abroad (to the South Seas, or Malaya, or Japan), chat to all the colonial administrators and their families there, and then write bitterly hilarious stories about how small-minded/racist/sexually repressed they all were.
It was a formula that worked well, and indeed he was regarded by many critics as a kind of British Maupassant. His own secret love affairs made him especially sensitive to the secrets of others, and his work, in Hastings’s account, adds up to a kind of chronicle of sexual dominance and submission – on an emotional level, anyway – often told through cynical and uncensorious revelations about adultery, incest and other misdemeanours. He developed a narrative voice that was very easy to read – a character close to Maugham himself, conversational, entirely unshockable, a man of the world.
In real life, despite his voracious appetites, he could seem curiously sheltered:
Once when [American poet Glenway Westcott] and Maugham were contemplating a nude painting of a man and woman making love in the missionary position, Maugham observed that it was a pity two males could not perform like that. ‘I didn’t have the heart to tell him,’ said Westcott.
Sex, Maugham said privately, was ‘the keenest pleasure to which the body is susceptible’, and he was still active well into his eighties, not only with his partner Alan Searle but ‘with boys brought by Searle to the villa; he saw sex as one of the physical appetites it was healthy to indulge,’ as he told friends. This ‘villa’ was a big pile on the French Riviera where he ended up living a life of considerable comfort, regularly visited by pals like Noel Coward, Winston Churchill, HG Wells, Rebecca West, Charlie Chaplin, Hugh Walpole, the Duke of Windsor, people like that. You know, the usual.
That’s one reason, perhaps, why he never quite had street cred as a writer – the Bloomsbury group in particular were not fans.
Somerset Maugham with his villa, his swimming-pool, his chauffeur-driven limousine was the ultimate anti-bohemian, his luxurious style of living organically antipathetic to the high-minded inhabitants of Charleston and Gordon Square.
But another reason is just that the world changed. The end of Empire (which Maugham foresaw with approval) meant that there was no longer much interest in reading about frustrated memsahibs in the jungle and bored circuit officials. There’s still a lot to learn from his writing though – and, it becomes abundantly clear, from his life too. Hastings tells the story brilliantly, with an eye for anecdotal detail and prurient revelation that almost matches her subject. Maugham, a secretive man, would have been appalled: for the rest of us, this is one of the best literary biographies out there.
January 1, 2012
This is how biography should be written and I unhesitatingly recommend it - to the extent that I will now be seeking out Selina Hastings' account of Evelyn Waugh (she has also written biographies of Nancy Mitford and Rosamond Lehmann).
The achievement is all the more remarkable because Maugham, perfectly in character, systematically destroyed his own private papers and encouraged his correspondents to do the same, so Hastings has had to construct his life out of a paucity of material, much of which she must count as gossip.
Like all the best biographies, this is not just about a person but about the culture and environment in which that person flourished.
In Maugham's case, a central interest is in how a homosexual from the English middle classes managed to survive and prosper in an era when sexuality was being increasingly suppressed, often because British imperial morality had to be imposed to justify rule over 'lesser people'.
Maugham is not always a nice person but he is basically a decent one, whose skill (at the root of his creativity) was his ability to distance himself from the mores of his culture, observe them detachedly and then reproduce them in narratives that could be played back to its members.
That detachment had its autistic moments. The paradox that his was a type of mind that could learn its way into convention and conformity, often with snobbism and some ritual, but perhaps did not always understand that the subjects of his investigation might not take kindly to his exposure.
The comically suburban English middle classes of Malaya and a number of individuals found to their cost that Maugham, for all his grace and quiet charm, was treating them as mere raw material for sometimes coruscating insights into their own idiosyncrasies and delusions.
This biography covers some ninety years of history from the 1880s to the 1960s so no review can do justice to the issues raised but there are some themes that can be traced throughout the story.
Maugham's homosexuality is clearly one of these, with insights into a fairly free and open gay culture amongst the prosperous and their young acquisitions, largely conducted overseas - in Italy and France or on foreign trips outside the prying eyes of convention.
There is a genuine 'gay marriage' (avant la lettre) with Gerald Haxton, whose death has a devastating effect on Maugham, while his 'secretary' of his final decades, Alan Searle, comes across as an insecure camp 'poison dwarf' of a type not unfamiliar from the literature.
But there is also the tensions of a bourgeois family life with issues of inheritance, hatreds, rivalry and misunderstandings that would be 'normal' in any English family with some property - the murders investigated by Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot relied on such.
The work takes second place in the book to the life. Hastings is perhaps a little embarrassed by the fact that, though he was immensely popular, becoming one of the richest literary figures of his era (a super star like GB Shaw), his work is not managing to 'last'.
The truth is that he was a very fine story teller but one relating not so much to eternal human verities as the contingent verities at the high point of a crumbling empire.
The British Empire in the middle of the twentieth century was at its very largest but it was also over-stretched and reliant on exporting increasingly dim losers from minor public schools to administer it. The analogies with its successor empire today do not need to be laboured.
Whether his extensive body of drama (where he was a key figure in the first three decades of the London and New York stage) or his short stories that took up the story of empire where Conrad and Kipling left off, these were tales about a world which has not survived.
Maugham will thus always be of great historical interest and there are some 'eternal verities' (especially about snobbery and cruelty) to be taken from the work but he knew what he was and rarely tried to claim to be greater than he was.
The rest of the literary world treated him with courteous private disdain and perhaps that attitude, which festered as a form of literary elitism throughout the second half of the last century, is precisely why 'literature' has degenerated into a cult of self-reference for a minority.
The problem was that Maugham did have a vision of the world that was a little more advanced - he always tended to what would be called the centre-left today and was deeply anti-war despite his own bravery on occasions - but whenever he tried to do an HG Wells or GB Shaw, his efforts failed.
In his novels, fine breezy narrative and exquisite characterisation might be held back by a block of writing where he tried a dash of didacticism or literary experimentation but the reader would always be grateful when these moments passed.
Having said this, Hastings does an excellent job of rehabilitating and explaining him. Nearly all his significant books are still in print as paperbacks (in the UK) and are still enjoyed for what they are - excellent storytelling written subtly but at the level of the literate middle class.
There is much other interesting material in this book - about the interconnections between the transatlantic theatrical community, literary society and Hollywood and about the 'gay' component to the machine producing popular culture.
The internationalism of Maugham's world is also an eye-opener. He was half-French by upbringing (though entirely English in other respects), he travelled extensively and he shuttled between the US, England and the South of France because borders did not then matter to the creative and wealthy.
It makes one realise the extent to which Anglo-American hegemony (to which France was aligned) represented a freedom of movement that only really closed up with the second world war.
All in all, a superb biography, clearly written, astute and honest when dealing with gossip and with the man and his weaknesses. I am not sure I would have sought out the company of this bright and irascible man but I would have recognised him as fundamentally decent, better than his peers.
There are good photographs, a full index and short and judicious accounts of his works as they appeared. Fortunately, this really is a biography and not criticism masked by a life story. For this alone, Ms. Hastings should be thanked.
The achievement is all the more remarkable because Maugham, perfectly in character, systematically destroyed his own private papers and encouraged his correspondents to do the same, so Hastings has had to construct his life out of a paucity of material, much of which she must count as gossip.
Like all the best biographies, this is not just about a person but about the culture and environment in which that person flourished.
In Maugham's case, a central interest is in how a homosexual from the English middle classes managed to survive and prosper in an era when sexuality was being increasingly suppressed, often because British imperial morality had to be imposed to justify rule over 'lesser people'.
Maugham is not always a nice person but he is basically a decent one, whose skill (at the root of his creativity) was his ability to distance himself from the mores of his culture, observe them detachedly and then reproduce them in narratives that could be played back to its members.
That detachment had its autistic moments. The paradox that his was a type of mind that could learn its way into convention and conformity, often with snobbism and some ritual, but perhaps did not always understand that the subjects of his investigation might not take kindly to his exposure.
The comically suburban English middle classes of Malaya and a number of individuals found to their cost that Maugham, for all his grace and quiet charm, was treating them as mere raw material for sometimes coruscating insights into their own idiosyncrasies and delusions.
This biography covers some ninety years of history from the 1880s to the 1960s so no review can do justice to the issues raised but there are some themes that can be traced throughout the story.
Maugham's homosexuality is clearly one of these, with insights into a fairly free and open gay culture amongst the prosperous and their young acquisitions, largely conducted overseas - in Italy and France or on foreign trips outside the prying eyes of convention.
There is a genuine 'gay marriage' (avant la lettre) with Gerald Haxton, whose death has a devastating effect on Maugham, while his 'secretary' of his final decades, Alan Searle, comes across as an insecure camp 'poison dwarf' of a type not unfamiliar from the literature.
But there is also the tensions of a bourgeois family life with issues of inheritance, hatreds, rivalry and misunderstandings that would be 'normal' in any English family with some property - the murders investigated by Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot relied on such.
The work takes second place in the book to the life. Hastings is perhaps a little embarrassed by the fact that, though he was immensely popular, becoming one of the richest literary figures of his era (a super star like GB Shaw), his work is not managing to 'last'.
The truth is that he was a very fine story teller but one relating not so much to eternal human verities as the contingent verities at the high point of a crumbling empire.
The British Empire in the middle of the twentieth century was at its very largest but it was also over-stretched and reliant on exporting increasingly dim losers from minor public schools to administer it. The analogies with its successor empire today do not need to be laboured.
Whether his extensive body of drama (where he was a key figure in the first three decades of the London and New York stage) or his short stories that took up the story of empire where Conrad and Kipling left off, these were tales about a world which has not survived.
Maugham will thus always be of great historical interest and there are some 'eternal verities' (especially about snobbery and cruelty) to be taken from the work but he knew what he was and rarely tried to claim to be greater than he was.
The rest of the literary world treated him with courteous private disdain and perhaps that attitude, which festered as a form of literary elitism throughout the second half of the last century, is precisely why 'literature' has degenerated into a cult of self-reference for a minority.
The problem was that Maugham did have a vision of the world that was a little more advanced - he always tended to what would be called the centre-left today and was deeply anti-war despite his own bravery on occasions - but whenever he tried to do an HG Wells or GB Shaw, his efforts failed.
In his novels, fine breezy narrative and exquisite characterisation might be held back by a block of writing where he tried a dash of didacticism or literary experimentation but the reader would always be grateful when these moments passed.
Having said this, Hastings does an excellent job of rehabilitating and explaining him. Nearly all his significant books are still in print as paperbacks (in the UK) and are still enjoyed for what they are - excellent storytelling written subtly but at the level of the literate middle class.
There is much other interesting material in this book - about the interconnections between the transatlantic theatrical community, literary society and Hollywood and about the 'gay' component to the machine producing popular culture.
The internationalism of Maugham's world is also an eye-opener. He was half-French by upbringing (though entirely English in other respects), he travelled extensively and he shuttled between the US, England and the South of France because borders did not then matter to the creative and wealthy.
It makes one realise the extent to which Anglo-American hegemony (to which France was aligned) represented a freedom of movement that only really closed up with the second world war.
All in all, a superb biography, clearly written, astute and honest when dealing with gossip and with the man and his weaknesses. I am not sure I would have sought out the company of this bright and irascible man but I would have recognised him as fundamentally decent, better than his peers.
There are good photographs, a full index and short and judicious accounts of his works as they appeared. Fortunately, this really is a biography and not criticism masked by a life story. For this alone, Ms. Hastings should be thanked.
September 8, 2010
To put my cards on the table: I've never liked Maugham's fiction and I've never liked Maugham, or what I knew of him, so it's a very good question as to why I would read a 640-page biography of him. In truth, I didn't think I would make it through the first fifty pages, but the reviews made it tempting to at least give the book a try. I'm glad I did. Selina Hastings tart, clear, intelligent prose drove me on through misery, scandal, and a strong dose of depravity with a feeling of constant astonishment and toward what can only be called a tentative feeling of (sigh) empathy. Maugham was extremely complex and in these pages the different facets of his personality, often at war with each other, end up creating something much more interesting than the sum of their parts. I would be lying if I pretended that the endless scandal of his life (almost entirely successfully hushed up while he was alive) wasn't a large part of my pleasure of the book — but the world it portrays of gay life and literary life in Edwardian England (and onwards — Maugham lived until the last month of 1965), the astonishment of his success once his reputation took fire (as a playwright, novelist, and above all a short story writer), and the sheer strangeness of it (he rode out most of WWII living in a cottage in North Carolina, where he swapped recipes with Eleanor Roosevelt) — well, the book is simply an amazement ... and an extremely well written one as well. I may well have to actually read him.
November 3, 2025
I initially encountered W. Somerset Maugham as a character in Tan Twa Eng's The House of Doors and was intrigued. The plot is based on Maugham's tendency to fictionalise juicy stories he heard while travelling the world. This led to my reading several of his novels, before encountering Hastings' biography via this review. I still haven't read Maugham's short stories, but an old Penguin collection sits on the shelf awaiting its turn. I found The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham fascinating, as it presents a thorough and detailed account of both his life and work. Maugham found international fame and incredible wealth from his plays, novels, short stories, and travel writing. I had not previously realised the extent of this, as he is less actively fêted in the twenty-first century than other writers of his era such as George Orwell.
Maugham worked in espionage during both world wars and had a tumultuous romantic life. Deeply attached to the appearance of propriety, he was nonetheless keen to have sex with any attractive young man he encountered. His marriage to Syrie Wellcome was deeply unhappy and he was not an involved father to his only child. He claimed to have never experienced requited love, but his friendships appeared endless, including many famous writers, actors, aristocrats, politicians, and artists of the time across Europe, America, and beyond. His final decades were spent in idyllic retirement, yet he died in an anguished and unhappy state of mind. Hastings treats Maugham with the same level of incisive and keen observation that the man himself applied to his characters.
I was pleased to learn that The House of Doors accurately depicted Maugham's process for gathering ideas, which he established as early as 1905:
Both social and antisocial, Maugham entertained a constant stream of visitors while insisting upon time for himself every day, both for reading and writing:
Hastings discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Maugham's specific works, as well as commenting on the broader choices in his writing. I think this is one clue as to why Orwell's writing has remained more visible; it contains more insight into political history:
What I have read of Maugham has an entirely different appeal to Orwell's work. Maugham's characters and scenarios are unusually vivid due to his impressive psychological insight:
Although Maugham's writing style isn't showy, it is impeccably polished:
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham is an illuminating and thoroughly researched piece of work, just the kind of biography that is most satisfying to read. My only complaint is that the text in the paperback edition I read was very small, thus somewhat tiring on the eyes.
Maugham worked in espionage during both world wars and had a tumultuous romantic life. Deeply attached to the appearance of propriety, he was nonetheless keen to have sex with any attractive young man he encountered. His marriage to Syrie Wellcome was deeply unhappy and he was not an involved father to his only child. He claimed to have never experienced requited love, but his friendships appeared endless, including many famous writers, actors, aristocrats, politicians, and artists of the time across Europe, America, and beyond. His final decades were spent in idyllic retirement, yet he died in an anguished and unhappy state of mind. Hastings treats Maugham with the same level of incisive and keen observation that the man himself applied to his characters.
I was pleased to learn that The House of Doors accurately depicted Maugham's process for gathering ideas, which he established as early as 1905:
This experience was an early instance of what was to evolve into a familiar pattern: a story relayed to Maugham by a third party, then redesigned by him in fictional form but with so little attempt at disguise that the work's appearance frequently resulted in shocked recognition and hurt feelings. Harry Phillips may have been the first but he was certainly not the last of these purveyors of tales to suffer from the furious fall-out consequent upon publication, a fall-out which generally left Maugham himself singularly undisturbed.
Both social and antisocial, Maugham entertained a constant stream of visitors while insisting upon time for himself every day, both for reading and writing:
Throughout his life Maugham referred to his love of reading as an addiction; it was, he explained, 'a necessity, and if I am deprived of it for a little while I find myself as irritable as the addict deprived of his drug'; wherever he was he took care to be well supplied with books, on his travels always taking a trunkful with him.
Hastings discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Maugham's specific works, as well as commenting on the broader choices in his writing. I think this is one clue as to why Orwell's writing has remained more visible; it contains more insight into political history:
[In Burma, George Orwell] clearly foresaw the end of the Empire, while Maugham appeared not so much unaware of as indifferent to the subject. [...] The fall of the Empire was not his topic. Much of the enormous popularity of Maugham's stories stems from the fact that he knew his limitations, perfectly understood the range of his engagement: it was not the big picture that appealed to his imagination but the small lives of unremarkable individuals struggling to create the reassuringly ordinary out of an extravagantly exotic environment.
What I have read of Maugham has an entirely different appeal to Orwell's work. Maugham's characters and scenarios are unusually vivid due to his impressive psychological insight:
Shrewd and uncompromising, he is finely attuned to nuance in speech and gesture; he is also compassionate, often funny, and almost never passes judgement on the frequently appalling behaviour of his usually far from estimable characters. He wrote about ordinary, fallible people, the kind of people he knew and understood, the white professional middle classes, and when challenged about why he never attempted to depict native life, he replied that it was because he did not believe any European could get to the inside of it.
Although Maugham's writing style isn't showy, it is impeccably polished:
The deceptive simplicity of Maugham's method conceals a well-honed technique, as anyone who has tried to imitate it will know. [...] His hallmarks were the plain style, the absolute verisimilitude, the dramatist's deftness with dialogue and often the provision of the unexpected denouement, the twist in the tail, that leaves the reader shocked and delighted. 'His plots are cool and deadly and his timing is absolutely flawless,' said Raymond Chandler, himself an expert in the genre.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham is an illuminating and thoroughly researched piece of work, just the kind of biography that is most satisfying to read. My only complaint is that the text in the paperback edition I read was very small, thus somewhat tiring on the eyes.
October 9, 2023
I can see where this biography would be exceptionally interesting to those that want to know the human side of William Somerset Maugham. Its contents spend more time on the negatively emotional events in Maugham’s life rather than the actual events and experiences that inspired his writing. While these two aspects of a writer’s life are inseparable, Hastings tends to summarily move through Maugham’s life until reaching these emotional crises and then dwells on them extensively. For instance, the details of Maugham’s travels, which ended up driving many of his stories, are mostly described as a part of the timeline of his experiences with only a casual reference back to the resulting novels or stories.
Another displeasing aspect of Hasting’s writing was her tendency to name-drop at every opportunity. This came across as a sort of pandering to the sensational. A few of these names were interesting if you knew who they were, but other names have now faded from common notoriety.
As a biography of Maugham, this book would probably serve better as a second effort, deep-dive experience. With the basic facts behind Maugham’s writing inspirations already known, the emotional crises that he experienced might seem more interesting.
Another displeasing aspect of Hasting’s writing was her tendency to name-drop at every opportunity. This came across as a sort of pandering to the sensational. A few of these names were interesting if you knew who they were, but other names have now faded from common notoriety.
As a biography of Maugham, this book would probably serve better as a second effort, deep-dive experience. With the basic facts behind Maugham’s writing inspirations already known, the emotional crises that he experienced might seem more interesting.
Want to read
March 19, 2017Kindle edition 19,82€????!!!! Are you kidding me???!!!
I need my "shock" koala!
No way I'll buy it for this price.
And I would like to read this book :(
Kindle price update: € 24,32
I need my "shock" koala!
No way I'll buy it for this price.
And I would like to read this book :(
Kindle price update: € 24,32
June 24, 2010
I’ve long been a Maugham fan so I looked forward to reading this book. I wasn’t disappointed. Hastings includes an amazing level of detail and a nice balance between points about his writing and facts about his personal life. Her source notes, bibliography, and index are about 75 pages and that’s without the notes. I find footnotes much more helpful than having to flip to the back. “The Secret Lives” reads like a novel though with lots of specificity. One of the best things was reading Maugham’s own thoughts on happenings set against a friend’s take on the same incident or perception. It gave a more complete personality study. It was fun to puzzle the relationship between facts and novel characters, speculating how they tied in. This isn’t a homage nor is it an expose. Hastings hit a wonderful balance in that regard.
What a life Maugham led. He seems to have known all of English society and people in the arts as well as prominent Americans. Though he was an introvert he loved playing host to his friends but he was strict about blocking out time to write and read. He lost both his parents a few years apart when he was a preteen, he was born in France to a French mother and French was his first language, he stuttered, he had tuberculosis, he worked undercover for Britain in both wars, he spent most of World War II in the American south, he was openly gay around his friends, he spoke many European languages, he had one daughter from an unpleasant marriage, he made lots of money especially from his plays. I enjoyed reading about his travels with his lover through the years and how they worked together to gather expatriot’s stories. Many of these stories ended up in his writings. Hastings also included pictures of Maugham and his friends notably one with H.G. Wells and Winston Churchill on an English lawn. Sadly, at the end of his life, he was betrayed by some key people. I could almost understand this if they did it to get his money but they seemed to have done it mostly for a whiff of power. I enjoyed this book immensely; it was well written and well researched.
What a life Maugham led. He seems to have known all of English society and people in the arts as well as prominent Americans. Though he was an introvert he loved playing host to his friends but he was strict about blocking out time to write and read. He lost both his parents a few years apart when he was a preteen, he was born in France to a French mother and French was his first language, he stuttered, he had tuberculosis, he worked undercover for Britain in both wars, he spent most of World War II in the American south, he was openly gay around his friends, he spoke many European languages, he had one daughter from an unpleasant marriage, he made lots of money especially from his plays. I enjoyed reading about his travels with his lover through the years and how they worked together to gather expatriot’s stories. Many of these stories ended up in his writings. Hastings also included pictures of Maugham and his friends notably one with H.G. Wells and Winston Churchill on an English lawn. Sadly, at the end of his life, he was betrayed by some key people. I could almost understand this if they did it to get his money but they seemed to have done it mostly for a whiff of power. I enjoyed this book immensely; it was well written and well researched.
January 31, 2016
Known as the “greatest writer of the 20th century” Somerset Maugham indeed had many lives, public and secret, and this book focuses on both aspects of this complex yet disciplined man.
A shy boy, orphaned by the age of 10, with a perennial stammer, Maugham spent his early years in France and was more French than English when he arrived in England to be the ward of his dull, pastor uncle and wife, to lead an unhappy life that was to be the grist for his most famous novel, Of Human Bondage. A bright student, he graduated from medical school but never practised, as he gave himself to writing. Success was hard-earned for many of his early novels, stories and plays were rejected until Lady Frederick launched him into the theatre limelight where he was to bask in, earn most of his fortune, and write over 30 plays during an equal amount of years. The novels and stories were to follow, culled from his life and from his travels in the South Pacific, the Orient, South America and the Caribbean.
Maugham recognized his bi-sexuality from his teen years—he was more homo than hetero— but given the “illegality” of the former at the time, he had to live a duplicitous life. Unlike his more restricted peer, E.M. Forster, Maugham indulged his sexuality, often skirting the edges of danger to his reputation. It was fashionable then for men to marry women for respectability and then indulge their sexuality with men and boys. And Maugham being from the professional class, these transgressions were deemed socially acceptable behaviour, especially within the arts world, though legally they were not.
He served in both world wars even though he was too old for active duty even in WWI. In the first war he was a spy couriering information between field operatives and HQ; in the second conflagration, and a world-famous author and playwright by then, he was used as an “influencer” to get America to join the war.
Despite his mounting fame, wealth and lavish lifestyle on the Riviera, in London and Hollywood, Maugham’s private life was barren and tense, for the people he was nearest to let him down. His marriage to Syrie, a union he entered into because he had to do “the right thing” by her, was loveless and ended in acrimony, leading to a bitter divorce and alimony for nearly 30 years. Syrie, a London socialite, went onto develop her own design career by leveraging Maugham’s fame. His long relationship with Gerald Hexton, a drunken playboy, ended in many embarrassing situations before Hexton succumbed to alcoholic excess in his early fifties. Other personal assistants like Alan Searle and Robin Maugham (his nephew), who were both homosexual, ended up costing Maugham money and his reputation. And his only daughter, Liza, ended up launching a lawsuit against him over her inheritance.
He was a reserved man—some say caused by his stammer—who observed more than talked, who had rigid habits (he wrote daily from 9 a.m. to 12noon, which was also his greatest refuge from people), he disliked the Hollywood and the theatre societies although he had to associate and profit from them, he was reluctant to proposition his many male sexual conquests and had Hexton do his dirty work. He was also a lucky man, for success begat success. His short story “Rain,” for instance, earned him over a million dollars in royalties when it was converted into a play, three movies, a musical and a ballet.
And yet the literary establishment shunned him, as he was deemed a popular writer, catering to low-brow tastes, “the best of the second-rate” as he was known. And Maugham too exploited the zeitgeist, focussing his plays on relationships between husbands and wives, and his stories and novels on characters and situations that had been relayed to him by others, or observed by him first-hand during his travels. You never told Maugham the story of your life, for you would soon appear in one of his books. And he gets full marks for being prolific: he could churn out a three-act play in four weeks.
As age and memory loss advanced, his minders Alan and Robin forced him to write an autobiography that proved his undoing. Looking Back would have been better dubbed “Look Back in Anger” for Maugham broke the English Gentleman’s code by venting his anger on his ex-wife and on all those who had hurt him. His fans deserted him and members of his club failed to acknowledge him when he put in an appearance. Alan Searle profited from the royalties. Maugham died at the age of 91, demented, angry and violent—a sad end to a gifted man.
This biography is a gripping read, for the narrative flows swiftly. This is a book about a literary life and not about the literary process of a famous writer. Many literary personalities of the last century make cameo appearances, among them: Noel Coward, Graham Greene, Nelson Doubleday, the Woolfs, Hugh Walpole, Edith Wharton, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence among others. It is therefore not just a story about Maugham but of the entire literary firmament that emerged before, between, and after the world wars.
One wonders why Maugham was destined for such literary greatness. I find it in his mantra: “A writer’s work is more important than his happiness.” Maugham lived his mantra with single-minded purpose despite the many distractions that were placed in his path, and he reaped what he sowed, for better or worse.
January 13, 2022
There was something infinitely seductive in the persona he frequently adopted as narrator, a narrator who both is and is not part of the story, a man of the world with a clear eye and sardonic sense of humor, who in a leisurely manner over a drink and a cigar settles down to confide in the reader something pretty fascinating about the kind of ordinary chap encountered any day of the week in a bar or club.
W. Somerset Maugham is one of my favorite discoveries from my classics reading project. I started by rereading The Razor's Edge, which was actually his last decent novel (followed by two historical novels that the critics apparently panned), in which Maugham himself is a character. I've also really enjoyed Of Human Bondage, The Painted Veil, and Cakes and Ale (and have several others on my reading list for the year).
Of Human Bondage and Cakes and Ale, written 15 years apart, are both highly autobiographical, based on Maugham's unhappy childhood and youthful attempts to find himself, making me curious about how much was factual. When I heard that this biography was excellent, I tracked down a copy (an ex-library copy that I found online, since my regional library system doesn't have it) despite the fact that I don't generally love biographies. (The last one I remember attempting was the much praised Alexander Hamilton, which I could not hack.)
Despite being 550 pages, Ms. Hastings' writing makes this tome fly by like a novel. (The exception being some of the details of his social life, which would probably be more interesting to me if I was (a) British or (b) the type of Anglophile whose interest extends to nobility.) She has excellent material to work with, which helps. Maugham was born at the end of the Victorian era, came of age as queer during the trial and ruin of Oscar Wilde, traveled the world, became hugely famous (and wealthy) as a playwright and novelist, worked as a British spy during WWI (and to a lesser degree in WWII), and lived a glamourous life into his 80s, when he succumbed to dementia and basically alienated everyone who cared about him, including his only child, before dying at almost 92. Along the way, he was fiercely protective of his privacy, destroying all his correspondence and asking friends to do the same (which, obviously, not all did), yet Ms. Hastings was able to reconstruct much of his life. (I wish she'd kept some of his secrets quiet. In general, I don't like when biographers get too up in their subjects' bedrooms. I could have done without all the details of Maugham's interest in much, much younger men.)
Overall, a fascinating biography of a complicated and very talented writer, which extended my to-read list even more.
W. Somerset Maugham is one of my favorite discoveries from my classics reading project. I started by rereading The Razor's Edge, which was actually his last decent novel (followed by two historical novels that the critics apparently panned), in which Maugham himself is a character. I've also really enjoyed Of Human Bondage, The Painted Veil, and Cakes and Ale (and have several others on my reading list for the year).
Of Human Bondage and Cakes and Ale, written 15 years apart, are both highly autobiographical, based on Maugham's unhappy childhood and youthful attempts to find himself, making me curious about how much was factual. When I heard that this biography was excellent, I tracked down a copy (an ex-library copy that I found online, since my regional library system doesn't have it) despite the fact that I don't generally love biographies. (The last one I remember attempting was the much praised Alexander Hamilton, which I could not hack.)
Despite being 550 pages, Ms. Hastings' writing makes this tome fly by like a novel. (The exception being some of the details of his social life, which would probably be more interesting to me if I was (a) British or (b) the type of Anglophile whose interest extends to nobility.) She has excellent material to work with, which helps. Maugham was born at the end of the Victorian era, came of age as queer during the trial and ruin of Oscar Wilde, traveled the world, became hugely famous (and wealthy) as a playwright and novelist, worked as a British spy during WWI (and to a lesser degree in WWII), and lived a glamourous life into his 80s, when he succumbed to dementia and basically alienated everyone who cared about him, including his only child, before dying at almost 92. Along the way, he was fiercely protective of his privacy, destroying all his correspondence and asking friends to do the same (which, obviously, not all did), yet Ms. Hastings was able to reconstruct much of his life. (I wish she'd kept some of his secrets quiet. In general, I don't like when biographers get too up in their subjects' bedrooms. I could have done without all the details of Maugham's interest in much, much younger men.)
Overall, a fascinating biography of a complicated and very talented writer, which extended my to-read list even more.
December 16, 2018
An interesting biography of a fascinating person who lived a long interesting life in interesting times. Interesting; I should re-read Maugham, now that I know more about the background.
June 15, 2020
Brilliant, entertaining, insightful read, this, from the first page to last. Not much more to add - if you're thinking about it, get it and read it.
April 5, 2023
I keep a list of books I’ve read. Scanning it over in preparation for this review, I discovered that Hastings’ is the third biography of Maugham I read. How did that happen? I must care about this man. The previous biographies were from Anthony Curtis, Somerset Maugham and Robert Calder, Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham. I recommend Calder’s book if you haven’t read much of Maugham’s writing and would like to explore it in the context of his life’s story.
Selina Hastings delivers a more comprehensive work on Maugham the man and his life, the story unto itself, independent of his own enchanting words. She fills in telling details the other biographers leave out, Here is one: During one of his long holidays in Italy, Willie received news that one of his plays would premier in London. His bank balance was near zero, inadequate to pay his return fare. He summoned his bravado and persuaded the travel agent to accept two bad checks. This is a pattern I have noticed. Influential people invariably cheat others and run out on their debts. They are born with the solid conviction that they are more important than others and their mission cannot be delayed by legal or moral obligations. Examples litter the historical landscape: All military leaders prevailed by spending human lives. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison—while innocent of murder—pushed their business partners out of the spotlight, stole their earnings, cheated service providers and lied to investors. I hate to admit the necessity of these actions, but the pattern is no accident. Each of the Big Three names above exists in my mind because they eliminated their rivals. It’s a natural weeding-out process; only the ruthless are remembered. Where does this conviction of superiority and capacity for cheating come from? I don’t think it can be learned; it must be inborn. Elaine Aron observed that each person contains a set sensitivity to stimuli, rather like a thermostat. Adventurous people are easily bored. In order to remain alert, they require a level of stimulation that can make a highly sensitive person’s head explode. Just as a thermostat sets a maintenance point between heat and cold, each of us knows—or finds out through rough experience—how much risk we can tolerate, how much safety we need to function.
Interesting to me was the hypocrisy and bitter envy demonstrated by Maugham and his literary ‘friends.’ Example 1:
“In 1959 there had been one biographical work, W. Somerset Maugham: A Candid Portrait, by Maugham’s old acquaintance Karl G. Pfeiffer, then a professor of English at New York University; it was gossipy, inaccurate, mildly malicious, and on the whole harmless, but Maugham had disliked it exceedingly, not only because of the invasion of privacy but because he felt betrayed: he had known Pfeiffer, had even had him to stay at the Mauresque, and had had no idea that their conversations were being secretly recorded for a book.”
Pfeiffer did nothing other than what Maugham had done his whole career, set down what he saw and heard, without crippling regard for his subjects. Naturally Maugham leaped into histrionics of “betrayal.”
Example 2:
“[For Maugham’s 80th Birthday] Heinemann commissioned the novelist Jocelyn Brooke to put together a Festschrift, a collection of essays on Maugham by fellow writers to be presented to him as a birthday tribute. Brooke solicited contributions from many of the most distinguished literary figures of the day, from poets, publishers, novelists, critics, from Elizabeth Bowen, Angus Wilson, Rosamond Lehmann, Anthony Powell, William Plomer, Rose Macaulay, Rupert Hart-Davis, William Sansom, Raymond Mortimer, Peter Quennell, J. R. Ackerley, Noël Coward.
But to Brooke’s dismay, one after the other the polite excuses came flowing in: ‘not a great fan of his … obliged to decline’ (William Plomer), ‘don’t think I’m at all the person to write about [him]’ (Angus Wilson), ‘May I be excused?’ (William Sansom), ‘[cannot] because of the novel which I MUST finish’ (Elizabeth Bowen), “truly and deeply sorry to say that I cannot contribute” (Noël Coward). The only two acceptances came from Anthony Powell and Raymond Mortimer. ‘[I] shall produce 2000 words for you if I possibly can,’ wrote Mortimer, ‘[but] I don’t myself think that there is a great variety of things to say about Maugham [and] a devastating paper could be written on the limitations of his taste…. I am the last person, however, to emphasise such deficiencies … for he is a very old friend whom I regard with grateful affection.’ But two contributions were not enough, and in the face of this fastidious flinching, of this general lack of respect for Maugham’s work, Brooke had no option but to abandon the project.”
Remember The Great Gatsby and the worthlessness of 'friends.' Yes, especially artists.
Did these competitor’s envy Maugham’s outrageous success? Of course they did. Artists spend their whole lives resenting the success of their peers, torturing themselves with thoughts of “Why him? Why not me? Has the public lost all sense, to value his work over mine?” Now perhaps you expect me to temper this bold assertion with a buffer, something like “most, surely not all.” No. Every artist who has ever lived thought this about her successful peers. I can’t prove it to you here, but I know what I’m talking about.
Maugham himself wrote about this tension in Cakes and Ale:
“The elect sneer at popularity; they are inclined even to assert that it is proof of mediocrity; but they forget that posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known. It may be that some great masterpiece which deserves immortality has fallen stillborn from the press, but posterity will never hear of it; it may be
that posterity will scrap all the best sellers of our day, but it is among them that it must choose.”
The last aspect of this story I will comment on is the “treachery” of Alan Searle, who loved and cared for Maugham during the last years of his life. Hastings recounts how Searle manipulated Maugham into leaving him most of his wealth at the time of his death, “cheating” Maugham’s daughter Liza and nephew Robin of their rightful inheritance. While I doubt none of this story, I cannot share her condemnation of Searle, for two reasons.
1. I do not subscribe an absolute right of inheritance, wherein people demand money by virtue of being born of the correct mother. Searle cleaned up after Maugham through his ugly final stage, not Liza, not Robin. He served his lover; he didn’t simply expect an inheritance because he existed. Furthermore, if Alan convinced the senile Willie to change his mind and his will, that is not a crime.
2. Everyone in the family, including William Somerset Maugham, treated Alan Searle contemptuously. They were asking for a slap in the face. See Robert Greene’s Law 19: Know Who You’re Dealing With — Do Not Offend The Wrong Person. Alan Searle did commit the crime of coming from “the lower classes,” and no one ever let him forget it. Even Hastings cannot describe a single event from Alan’s life without reminding us that he was no Gerald Haxton.
“With most of Maugham’s friends [Alan Searle] quickly adopted a manner of cozy intimacy, and in many cases, because they in return were genial toward him, he came to believe that he was held in much higher regard than was in fact the case.”
Perhaps Alan knew exactly how he was regarded. When people are treated this way, they notice, they silently plan their revenge, and they often succeed in getting it.
About the man and his writing: I did not have the privilege of reading Maugham in school. He was mentioned by an Art History teacher as a second-rate ‘popular’ (oh the insult!) author. My teacher’s comment was, “Everyone must read Of Human Bondage once, but it doesn’t bear a second reading.” Taking him at his word, I did not open a book by Maugham until my 40s. Since then he has given me a wealth of pleasure. These are the books I have read by him:
Of Human Bondage
Then and Now
Cakes and Ale
The Moon and Sixpence
The Complete Short Stories, 3 Volumes
The Painted Veil
The Razor’s Edge
The Summing Up
Selina Hastings delivers a more comprehensive work on Maugham the man and his life, the story unto itself, independent of his own enchanting words. She fills in telling details the other biographers leave out, Here is one: During one of his long holidays in Italy, Willie received news that one of his plays would premier in London. His bank balance was near zero, inadequate to pay his return fare. He summoned his bravado and persuaded the travel agent to accept two bad checks. This is a pattern I have noticed. Influential people invariably cheat others and run out on their debts. They are born with the solid conviction that they are more important than others and their mission cannot be delayed by legal or moral obligations. Examples litter the historical landscape: All military leaders prevailed by spending human lives. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison—while innocent of murder—pushed their business partners out of the spotlight, stole their earnings, cheated service providers and lied to investors. I hate to admit the necessity of these actions, but the pattern is no accident. Each of the Big Three names above exists in my mind because they eliminated their rivals. It’s a natural weeding-out process; only the ruthless are remembered. Where does this conviction of superiority and capacity for cheating come from? I don’t think it can be learned; it must be inborn. Elaine Aron observed that each person contains a set sensitivity to stimuli, rather like a thermostat. Adventurous people are easily bored. In order to remain alert, they require a level of stimulation that can make a highly sensitive person’s head explode. Just as a thermostat sets a maintenance point between heat and cold, each of us knows—or finds out through rough experience—how much risk we can tolerate, how much safety we need to function.
Interesting to me was the hypocrisy and bitter envy demonstrated by Maugham and his literary ‘friends.’ Example 1:
“In 1959 there had been one biographical work, W. Somerset Maugham: A Candid Portrait, by Maugham’s old acquaintance Karl G. Pfeiffer, then a professor of English at New York University; it was gossipy, inaccurate, mildly malicious, and on the whole harmless, but Maugham had disliked it exceedingly, not only because of the invasion of privacy but because he felt betrayed: he had known Pfeiffer, had even had him to stay at the Mauresque, and had had no idea that their conversations were being secretly recorded for a book.”
Pfeiffer did nothing other than what Maugham had done his whole career, set down what he saw and heard, without crippling regard for his subjects. Naturally Maugham leaped into histrionics of “betrayal.”
Example 2:
“[For Maugham’s 80th Birthday] Heinemann commissioned the novelist Jocelyn Brooke to put together a Festschrift, a collection of essays on Maugham by fellow writers to be presented to him as a birthday tribute. Brooke solicited contributions from many of the most distinguished literary figures of the day, from poets, publishers, novelists, critics, from Elizabeth Bowen, Angus Wilson, Rosamond Lehmann, Anthony Powell, William Plomer, Rose Macaulay, Rupert Hart-Davis, William Sansom, Raymond Mortimer, Peter Quennell, J. R. Ackerley, Noël Coward.
But to Brooke’s dismay, one after the other the polite excuses came flowing in: ‘not a great fan of his … obliged to decline’ (William Plomer), ‘don’t think I’m at all the person to write about [him]’ (Angus Wilson), ‘May I be excused?’ (William Sansom), ‘[cannot] because of the novel which I MUST finish’ (Elizabeth Bowen), “truly and deeply sorry to say that I cannot contribute” (Noël Coward). The only two acceptances came from Anthony Powell and Raymond Mortimer. ‘[I] shall produce 2000 words for you if I possibly can,’ wrote Mortimer, ‘[but] I don’t myself think that there is a great variety of things to say about Maugham [and] a devastating paper could be written on the limitations of his taste…. I am the last person, however, to emphasise such deficiencies … for he is a very old friend whom I regard with grateful affection.’ But two contributions were not enough, and in the face of this fastidious flinching, of this general lack of respect for Maugham’s work, Brooke had no option but to abandon the project.”
Remember The Great Gatsby and the worthlessness of 'friends.' Yes, especially artists.
Did these competitor’s envy Maugham’s outrageous success? Of course they did. Artists spend their whole lives resenting the success of their peers, torturing themselves with thoughts of “Why him? Why not me? Has the public lost all sense, to value his work over mine?” Now perhaps you expect me to temper this bold assertion with a buffer, something like “most, surely not all.” No. Every artist who has ever lived thought this about her successful peers. I can’t prove it to you here, but I know what I’m talking about.
Maugham himself wrote about this tension in Cakes and Ale:
“The elect sneer at popularity; they are inclined even to assert that it is proof of mediocrity; but they forget that posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known. It may be that some great masterpiece which deserves immortality has fallen stillborn from the press, but posterity will never hear of it; it may be
that posterity will scrap all the best sellers of our day, but it is among them that it must choose.”
The last aspect of this story I will comment on is the “treachery” of Alan Searle, who loved and cared for Maugham during the last years of his life. Hastings recounts how Searle manipulated Maugham into leaving him most of his wealth at the time of his death, “cheating” Maugham’s daughter Liza and nephew Robin of their rightful inheritance. While I doubt none of this story, I cannot share her condemnation of Searle, for two reasons.
1. I do not subscribe an absolute right of inheritance, wherein people demand money by virtue of being born of the correct mother. Searle cleaned up after Maugham through his ugly final stage, not Liza, not Robin. He served his lover; he didn’t simply expect an inheritance because he existed. Furthermore, if Alan convinced the senile Willie to change his mind and his will, that is not a crime.
2. Everyone in the family, including William Somerset Maugham, treated Alan Searle contemptuously. They were asking for a slap in the face. See Robert Greene’s Law 19: Know Who You’re Dealing With — Do Not Offend The Wrong Person. Alan Searle did commit the crime of coming from “the lower classes,” and no one ever let him forget it. Even Hastings cannot describe a single event from Alan’s life without reminding us that he was no Gerald Haxton.
“With most of Maugham’s friends [Alan Searle] quickly adopted a manner of cozy intimacy, and in many cases, because they in return were genial toward him, he came to believe that he was held in much higher regard than was in fact the case.”
Perhaps Alan knew exactly how he was regarded. When people are treated this way, they notice, they silently plan their revenge, and they often succeed in getting it.
About the man and his writing: I did not have the privilege of reading Maugham in school. He was mentioned by an Art History teacher as a second-rate ‘popular’ (oh the insult!) author. My teacher’s comment was, “Everyone must read Of Human Bondage once, but it doesn’t bear a second reading.” Taking him at his word, I did not open a book by Maugham until my 40s. Since then he has given me a wealth of pleasure. These are the books I have read by him:
Of Human Bondage
Then and Now
Cakes and Ale
The Moon and Sixpence
The Complete Short Stories, 3 Volumes
The Painted Veil
The Razor’s Edge
The Summing Up
August 2, 2025
I should justify my five stars but I can't because it is too long since I read this biography but, what I do remember was that finally here was a biography of Maugham that looked honestly and fully at him as queer man. It isn't that his sexual preferences were not mentioned previous to 2010, they were but as a sort adjunct to his life and possibly as an embarrassment. Selina Hastings is beyond all that and tackled and dealt with Maugham's 'queerness' brilliantly, it brought Maugham into sharper focus.
Maugham's is no longer the giant of popular English fiction that he was in his lifetime (1874-1965). His plays (in 1908 he had four plays in theatres in London's West End) are never going to be revived, his novels are largely forgotten, but his short stories - they are masterpieces and are read, and should be read.
Everyone knew he was queer before he died and as soon he was dead it was discussed interminably, not least by his nephew Robin Maugham, but it was always as the 'dirty' secret. Perhaps it was a question of people's attitudes changing, its nice to think they have matured, but Selina Hastings was able to place it within his life and his life around it, not as a bedroom secret but as a essential part of who Maugham was and what that meant for a man of his times.
This is a biography well worth reading again.
Maugham's is no longer the giant of popular English fiction that he was in his lifetime (1874-1965). His plays (in 1908 he had four plays in theatres in London's West End) are never going to be revived, his novels are largely forgotten, but his short stories - they are masterpieces and are read, and should be read.
Everyone knew he was queer before he died and as soon he was dead it was discussed interminably, not least by his nephew Robin Maugham, but it was always as the 'dirty' secret. Perhaps it was a question of people's attitudes changing, its nice to think they have matured, but Selina Hastings was able to place it within his life and his life around it, not as a bedroom secret but as a essential part of who Maugham was and what that meant for a man of his times.
This is a biography well worth reading again.
August 21, 2025
[Maugham] wrote to his literary agent, J.B. Pinker, to sever the association between them, explaining that he now had so many requests for plays he would no longer have time to write stories—a letter that Pinker sensibly chose to ignore.If I had a nickel for every white male author of repute who penned a (former) favorite of mine and whom I later found out to be some flavor of queer, I'd have at least two nickels, which isn't much but certainly of note. Maugham is the first encountered of the bunch, and the fact that I've trucked a number of his unread works around with me the last decade or so attests to the grip he still has on my imagination and my hope. Getting through nearly 600 pages of biography certainly attests to such, albeit in a form more interest in revelation rather than privacy, which in all honesty agrees rather nicely with Maugham's composition tendencies, if not his personal practice in regards to his own personal life choices.
"You are indeed a marvelous photographer & I feel that you have wasted your time being a wife & mother. You should have been a great artist & led a life of sin."The former he could have helped, but in the latter I do not blame him for a second. Indeed, I do have to wonder at the muted indifference of the 'literary' establishment, for wealth is one thing, the average number of references per page another, and when you compound it with a lifelong unorthodox popularly met with disgust and legally met with ruin, how much was the disapprobation a critical gaze and how much of it was jealousy? One will never know, especially when one must admit that Maugham could afford to be a surface dweller in the creative sphere where his talents at playing the fly on the wall drew on increasingly vast spans of distance and milieu. From infection ward to drawing room to colonial outpost to French Riviera, his increasing wealth and circumstance increasingly allowed him to go "fishing" (with his trusty young, upper class, and non-stuttering companion rakishly but never uncouthly breaking the ice) in worlds both more rarefied and more sordid: the former all that his audiences could ever aspire to in sinful human form, the latter all the "strangeness" one could swallow, with the nightlight of the British Empire forever protecting them from true harm.
-Maugham to Eleanor Roosevelt
[...] Maugham and Virginia Woolf were walking [...] when [...] bombers came over. "[I] shouted at [Virginia] to take cover but in the noise she couldn't hear [...] She made no attempt to take cover but stood in the middle of the road and threw her arms into the air. She appeared to be worshipping the flashing sky. It was a most weird sight to watch her there, lit up now and then by the flashes from the guns."A sublime beneficiary of his age, then, in terms of material if not of social mores, so of course it is those mores, those "secret lives" that drew me on. I will say, for all my admitted voyeurism, I took note when titles I had read and titles I knew still awaited me on my shelves swam across the pages, for the first time set in my brain in at least some of its proper historical context. Indeed, I am now convinced that I will have to give Of Human Bondage a third chance, for while the first two effusive, the second was too wounded, and the work deserves at least one read born of lust tempered by experience before I close the door. Still, it was the queer that drew me on, in Maugham's case the bisexuality, and as the biographer pens, Maugham could have loved in a far more comfortably legal fashion had fates fallen out as such. Of course, one must wonder whether a more heterosexual passing life would have led to as grand a writer discipline or as ignominiously acrid an end.
Decades later, For Services Rendered was to be recognized as one of Maugham's finest dramas, but for the middle and upper classes of the 1930s such radical pessimism was unpalatable; at a time of political instability and acute economic depression, audiences were angry at what they saw as a lack of patriotism, and they were made uncomfortable by the author's dismal prediction for the future.In the end, all I can say is that the tropes of the bitterly rich family cannibalizing each other for table scraps; the wretchedly unbalanced sexual relationships bound up in decades of the beloved and the abject; the cross-cultural high-jinks born from times of sickness and times of war; and the final crabbed, hysterical, and raging form of the wizened patriarch, whose pen was once followed by millions of pilgrims and whose heart may have never been permitted to truly love and be loved in return: all of them are true. The observer who was intimately aware of being observed and took what ruthless care he could to control what he could and utterly forsworn what he could not. An artistry fully wedded to the setting sun of its empire: the best a look at the human with all their foibles and their beauty, the worst a collection of dry vignettes whose baser forms grace the spreads of tabloid magazines. Maugham certainly made enough money to be freer than 99.999% of us could even dream of, but would he have given it all up to be able to wed his Haxton in some unassuming English parish? I do have to wonder.
In his eighties Maugham continued to write because in a sense he had no choice. "The fact is that, like drinking, writing is a very easy habit to form & a devilish hard one to break[.]"P.S. I also wondered at the biographer's own incentive to writing this, what with her being a peer of the realm and all.
April 21, 2025
I couldn’t put this biography down, it was so interesting.
From his idyllic, privileged upbringing in Paris as the youngest boy, adored by his mother, Somerset was transferred into the care of his unknown uncle and aunt in Whitstable in Kent when his mother died.
What follows is a description of his desperate loneliness and how he turned to reading as a source of company and escapism.
As he struggled to find a profession that suited him, he travelled widely and met a range of people, and based on his observations of these, he began his writing career.
The rest of the biography follows his professional, social and personal lives until his death at 92.
Strongly recommend
From his idyllic, privileged upbringing in Paris as the youngest boy, adored by his mother, Somerset was transferred into the care of his unknown uncle and aunt in Whitstable in Kent when his mother died.
What follows is a description of his desperate loneliness and how he turned to reading as a source of company and escapism.
As he struggled to find a profession that suited him, he travelled widely and met a range of people, and based on his observations of these, he began his writing career.
The rest of the biography follows his professional, social and personal lives until his death at 92.
Strongly recommend
November 25, 2012
Given that Maugham reveals so much of himself in his works and has given such a vivid description of his childhood, his views on art, love, marriage, life and sundry things, there's only so much more that a biography on him can reveal.
Selina Hastings' work therefore has nothing drastically new to say. But the book picks up with her description of Maugham's stunning professional ascent as a playwright after several years of struggle. She throws light on each of his works, the circumstances surrounding them and the public and critical response they elicited. Selina describes the plot line of most of Maugham's major works with a brief analysis and is spot on most of the time. None of her reading is particularly brillaint or insightful, but it is clearly from someone who has enjoyed studying Maugham.
She of course focusses amply on the author's private life which is what stayed under covers. Most of this is revealed through the letters that Maugham wrote, some of them being to his male lovers. The author, the biography says, distroyed all his private correspondences and even urged his friends to do the same. But his friends were no fools and opportunistically preserved the letters knowing they would fetch them handsome returns. Maugham was a biosexual, and appears to have had many affairs but thankfully Selina maintains a balance, never going overboard with salacious personal information. This despite the title of the book suggesting otherwise. This naturally lends the biography more credibility and if nothing more, it is an excellent chronicle of his life and work.
Her authorial voice is fluid and elegant but also a wee bit too restrained, so that at times the biography tends to drag. Yet, Selina has one admirable quality. Much like Maugham, Selina is able to see things from multiple persepectives and understands the compulsions under which characters act. Though Maugham disliked his wife, Syrie, and hated acknowledging her, terming his marriage as a very insignificant detail in his life, Selina is able to view Syrie's predicament and takes an empathetic view of her situation.
Maugham who enters the marriage never fully convinced about it soon realises his mistake. He becomes eager than ever to take up long travels with his male companion, Gerald, staying away from home for extended periods. Syrie by now is in love with Maugham and feels despondent and lonely. This results in ugly, loud scenes that unsettles and infuriates the author. The marriage ends in spite of resistance from Syrie and Maugham till the end resents having to shell out big amounts in allimony. This despite the fact that he was otherwise quite generous with money throughout his life. They have a girl child, Lisa and though Maugham is fond of her, he is never particularly close. Selina also suggets that the author might have preferred to have a son. Selina similarly also gives a rounded perspective of the two men in Maugham's life, Gerald Hastings and Alan Searle.
more...http://sandyi.blogspot.in/2012/09/the...
Selina Hastings' work therefore has nothing drastically new to say. But the book picks up with her description of Maugham's stunning professional ascent as a playwright after several years of struggle. She throws light on each of his works, the circumstances surrounding them and the public and critical response they elicited. Selina describes the plot line of most of Maugham's major works with a brief analysis and is spot on most of the time. None of her reading is particularly brillaint or insightful, but it is clearly from someone who has enjoyed studying Maugham.
She of course focusses amply on the author's private life which is what stayed under covers. Most of this is revealed through the letters that Maugham wrote, some of them being to his male lovers. The author, the biography says, distroyed all his private correspondences and even urged his friends to do the same. But his friends were no fools and opportunistically preserved the letters knowing they would fetch them handsome returns. Maugham was a biosexual, and appears to have had many affairs but thankfully Selina maintains a balance, never going overboard with salacious personal information. This despite the title of the book suggesting otherwise. This naturally lends the biography more credibility and if nothing more, it is an excellent chronicle of his life and work.
Her authorial voice is fluid and elegant but also a wee bit too restrained, so that at times the biography tends to drag. Yet, Selina has one admirable quality. Much like Maugham, Selina is able to see things from multiple persepectives and understands the compulsions under which characters act. Though Maugham disliked his wife, Syrie, and hated acknowledging her, terming his marriage as a very insignificant detail in his life, Selina is able to view Syrie's predicament and takes an empathetic view of her situation.
Maugham who enters the marriage never fully convinced about it soon realises his mistake. He becomes eager than ever to take up long travels with his male companion, Gerald, staying away from home for extended periods. Syrie by now is in love with Maugham and feels despondent and lonely. This results in ugly, loud scenes that unsettles and infuriates the author. The marriage ends in spite of resistance from Syrie and Maugham till the end resents having to shell out big amounts in allimony. This despite the fact that he was otherwise quite generous with money throughout his life. They have a girl child, Lisa and though Maugham is fond of her, he is never particularly close. Selina also suggets that the author might have preferred to have a son. Selina similarly also gives a rounded perspective of the two men in Maugham's life, Gerald Hastings and Alan Searle.
more...http://sandyi.blogspot.in/2012/09/the...
July 8, 2015
I thought this was an excellent biography. In addition to describing his personal life, it had a lot about his writing. It put each of his plays, novels and short stories into the context of his life, describing both plots and critical reception of them. There was quite a bit about his relationships with publishers and producers as well.
Much of the book detailed his marriage to Syrie Wellcome and his relationships with Gerald Haxton and Alan Searle, among others. He certainly didn't have a happy personal life. I kept wondering how different his life might have been if his parents hadn't died when he was young, if his uncle and aunt had been warmer people, if his homosexuality had been accepted and free of stigma.
I was fascinated by his wartime exploits (which I knew a little about from reading Ashenden) and his experiences as a traveller. Also quite interested to discover his importance as a dramatist. It was a surprise to read of his connection with Charles Frohman, who we last heard of during our group read about the Lusitania.
His work ethic was quite impressive. Even when he was one of the wealthiest writers alive and could have retired, he set aside time each morning to work.
It was difficult reading about his final years and the betrayal of Alan Searle and estrangement from his daughter. He didn't seem like much of a parent, and his treatment of his long-time lovers was hardly exemplary either. I don't think I would have liked him as a human being. And yet---his writing reveals him to have been a keen observer of people and their foibles.
I've really enjoyed everything of his that I've read so far.
Next on my Maugham list--The Painted Veil, Theatre, and The Summing Up.
Much of the book detailed his marriage to Syrie Wellcome and his relationships with Gerald Haxton and Alan Searle, among others. He certainly didn't have a happy personal life. I kept wondering how different his life might have been if his parents hadn't died when he was young, if his uncle and aunt had been warmer people, if his homosexuality had been accepted and free of stigma.
I was fascinated by his wartime exploits (which I knew a little about from reading Ashenden) and his experiences as a traveller. Also quite interested to discover his importance as a dramatist. It was a surprise to read of his connection with Charles Frohman, who we last heard of during our group read about the Lusitania.
His work ethic was quite impressive. Even when he was one of the wealthiest writers alive and could have retired, he set aside time each morning to work.
It was difficult reading about his final years and the betrayal of Alan Searle and estrangement from his daughter. He didn't seem like much of a parent, and his treatment of his long-time lovers was hardly exemplary either. I don't think I would have liked him as a human being. And yet---his writing reveals him to have been a keen observer of people and their foibles.
I've really enjoyed everything of his that I've read so far.
Next on my Maugham list--The Painted Veil, Theatre, and The Summing Up.
February 3, 2023
I am an enormous fan of Somerset Maugham; one of the happiest days in my life as a reader came when I was in London a few years ago, and I stumbled across the complete works in hardbook in a second-hand shop on the Charing Cross Road. I was supposed to be travelling light, but ended up putting all twenty-six volumes into my suitcase and carrying the rest of my holiday luggage home in Tesco bags.
I didn't know much of his life, however, until I read Hastings's account, and I am rather glad that this was my first exposure to the real Maugham, given the controversy that surrounds his other biographers.
Hastings gives everything that I would have asked in her book, including a detailed and intriguing life history, peppered with quotes from Maugham and his contemporaries, and analyses of his most major works. As an aspiring writer myself it was especially interesting to learn what had inspired Maugham to create his best works of fiction, and how he developed as a writer.
The close attention to detail did have one drawback, and by necessity. The last chapters are almost intolerably sad, as we see Maugham accelerate into old age, lose his lover, Gerald Haxton, and be betrayed by his closest friend, Alan Searle. I have not been this moved by a book since I finished Bolano's 2666, and had this biography been a work of fiction I imagine I might have enjoyed it - and been saddened - just as much.
I didn't know much of his life, however, until I read Hastings's account, and I am rather glad that this was my first exposure to the real Maugham, given the controversy that surrounds his other biographers.
Hastings gives everything that I would have asked in her book, including a detailed and intriguing life history, peppered with quotes from Maugham and his contemporaries, and analyses of his most major works. As an aspiring writer myself it was especially interesting to learn what had inspired Maugham to create his best works of fiction, and how he developed as a writer.
The close attention to detail did have one drawback, and by necessity. The last chapters are almost intolerably sad, as we see Maugham accelerate into old age, lose his lover, Gerald Haxton, and be betrayed by his closest friend, Alan Searle. I have not been this moved by a book since I finished Bolano's 2666, and had this biography been a work of fiction I imagine I might have enjoyed it - and been saddened - just as much.
August 12, 2020
By far my favorite writer, Maugham's live has always fascinated me, this admirable biography fills in all the gaps in my knowledge and then some.
I knew that large chunks of his masterpiece "Of Human Bondage" were biographical but it wasn't until i read this book that i realised how much Maugham used his own life.
I knew that Maugham was Homosexual or at least Bisexual and this book goes into great detail about his casual flings and long term relationships. The love between Maugham and Gerald Haxton is covered great detail as is Maugham's grief at Haxton's death.
The saddest and most poignant note was Maugham's grief for his beloved Mother, a loss he never got over, and the resulting loneliness and emotional neediness from which he suffered throughout his life. Also terrible is the accounts of the supposedly loving family and friends who plotted and schemed for their advantage especially as his death grew closer.
All in all a thorough and well written biography of one of the greatest writers in the English language.
I knew that large chunks of his masterpiece "Of Human Bondage" were biographical but it wasn't until i read this book that i realised how much Maugham used his own life.
I knew that Maugham was Homosexual or at least Bisexual and this book goes into great detail about his casual flings and long term relationships. The love between Maugham and Gerald Haxton is covered great detail as is Maugham's grief at Haxton's death.
The saddest and most poignant note was Maugham's grief for his beloved Mother, a loss he never got over, and the resulting loneliness and emotional neediness from which he suffered throughout his life. Also terrible is the accounts of the supposedly loving family and friends who plotted and schemed for their advantage especially as his death grew closer.
All in all a thorough and well written biography of one of the greatest writers in the English language.
February 5, 2020
I have long admired the novels and short stories of Somerset Maugham. I think few people now realize that Maugham was one of the world's most successful and celebrated writers for much of the first half of the 20th century. This biography details the successes he enjoyed, first as a dramatist, and later as a writer of novels and short stories and even a screenwriter. It also details his celebrity. The book provides a gripping account of Maugham's personal life. This includes the childhood traumas that profoundly influenced him, the trying years when he honed his skills and sought an audience, the pinnacle of his success and his encounters with the giants of the 20th century, and the sad bitterness of his final years. He lived an extraordinary life and it is well chronicled here--and the author doesn't flinch from the sordid elements of that life. Recommended for anyone with even a mild interest in Maugham's life.
December 7, 2011
On the whole, I thought this was a thorough and well-researched biography. Some of the source material the author used was quite obscure, which only goes to show how much effort went into the writing. Also, for the most part, she struck a good balance between appreciating why Maugham was important, but being aware of his flaws.
My biggest complaint would be that too much time was spent on salacious details and dissecting personal drama. I am not a fan of the tabloids, and don't enjoy seeing tabloid-esque writing in a serious work. In particular, the section on the end of Maugham's life came off as far too lurid. I'm not saying that such things should be entirely ignored, but there is no need to linger on every unpleasant detail. Also, I feel like discussion of some of Maugham's writings got shortchanged in favor of melodrama.
My biggest complaint would be that too much time was spent on salacious details and dissecting personal drama. I am not a fan of the tabloids, and don't enjoy seeing tabloid-esque writing in a serious work. In particular, the section on the end of Maugham's life came off as far too lurid. I'm not saying that such things should be entirely ignored, but there is no need to linger on every unpleasant detail. Also, I feel like discussion of some of Maugham's writings got shortchanged in favor of melodrama.
August 17, 2011
I work at Villa Mauresque and on finding out that the late great English writer was one of the former owners decided to read this book. The book is very well written. I would only wish for more photos of the house as there is a front view and afew by the pool. All has been changed but the stone steps leading down to the pool turn left and its the kitchen .
When I walk along the pool edge my mind goes back to what it must have been like in the hayday when Fleming , Churchill , Wallis Simpson were guests , I can almost hear them! Monets on the walls.
When I walk along the pool edge my mind goes back to what it must have been like in the hayday when Fleming , Churchill , Wallis Simpson were guests , I can almost hear them! Monets on the walls.
October 19, 2019
Well-written and carefully researched, this biography shows (or at least tries to show) the real warts-and-all Maugham. I found the man's obsession with sex with young boys disturbing in the extreme (and Selina Hastings does her best not to disclose the actual age of the boys). Still, I love Maugham's books and going to read all his short-stories and novels written after 1916.
September 11, 2023
可以说，毛姆晚年烧掉了自己手头所有能找到的私人信件，就是为了防止后人会写出这么一本关于他的传记。毛姆如泉下有知，想必会为这本书的出版气得七窍生烟，但我们读者却会因此而感激作者的深挖不懈。
毛姆的毒舌人尽皆知。不过读完此书，我发现毛姆的评价者和传记作者在这一点上也不遑多让。比如法国评论家保罗·多汀写道：“毫无疑问，毛姆迟早会得到一项荣誉：为‘不体面’这个词退出英语文学语言做出最大贡献的小说家之一。”比如本文作者也经常会写出这样的句子：“哈克斯顿三十岁了，正朝着百无一用的方向大步迈进。”我觉得，这大概也可以称之为“毛姆效应”了。
虽然毛姆清楚地意识到：“我知道自己的地位，我处于二流作家的最前列。”姑且信之。可他的人生之精彩跌宕，恐怕要远超绝大部分一流乃至顶尖的作家了。
复盘着他一次次海外旅行和冒险的路线，看着他写下“我正准备向远东进发。在不缺钱、不缺时间的情况下前往未知的领域，这是多么美妙的事情啊”这样的文字，想象着他冒着被德军潜艇击沉溺毙的风险盘腿坐在逃亡的运煤船甲板上读柏拉图的画面，除了“羡慕”我别无他词。
然而，本书作者对他晚年生活的描述又是如此沉重而哀伤。毛姆本人的信念是“人生没有原因，生命没有意义”。我大体赞同。他在自己人生终点的亲历，似乎也证明了这一点。
在那个避无可避的终点来临之前，和毛姆一样，阅读、表达、出门远行、肆意地去爱，这或许就是我们必须要发明出来的意义了吧。
毛姆的毒舌人尽皆知。不过读完此书，我发现毛姆的评价者和传记作者在这一点上也不遑多让。比如法国评论家保罗·多汀写道：“毫无疑问，毛姆迟早会得到一项荣誉：为‘不体面’这个词退出英语文学语言做出最大贡献的小说家之一。”比如本文作者也经常会写出这样的句子：“哈克斯顿三十岁了，正朝着百无一用的方向大步迈进。”我觉得，这大概也可以称之为“毛姆效应”了。
虽然毛姆清楚地意识到：“我知道自己的地位，我处于二流作家的最前列。”姑且信之。可他的人生之精彩跌宕，恐怕要远超绝大部分一流乃至顶尖的作家了。
复盘着他一次次海外旅行和冒险的路线，看着他写下“我正准备向远东进发。在不缺钱、不缺时间的情况下前往未知的领域，这是多么美妙的事情啊”这样的文字，想象着他冒着被德军潜艇击沉溺毙的风险盘腿坐在逃亡的运煤船甲板上读柏拉图的画面，除了“羡慕”我别无他词。
然而，本书作者对他晚年生活的描述又是如此沉重而哀伤。毛姆本人的信念是“人生没有原因，生命没有意义”。我大体赞同。他在自己人生终点的亲历，似乎也证明了这一点。
在那个避无可避的终点来临之前，和毛姆一样，阅读、表达、出门远行、肆意地去爱，这或许就是我们必须要发明出来的意义了吧。
June 12, 2019
I was quite cautious about picking this book up. “Theatre” was my favorite book in my teens, I still could easily repeat the whole pieces of it by heart. Now I feel like to reread some other books written by Maugham. So frankly I was afraid to be disappointed with him after reading his biography. And I relieved to admit - I am still find Somerset Maugham an extraordinary person. The biography is well researched, written with respect and honesty. A little too long to my liking though and in parts tedious but definitely worth to check it out if you would like to know more about Maugham.
December 8, 2023
Eminently readable, and it's a good thing. Why I chose to read a book like this during the holiday season, when I have zero bandwidth and little time, I do not know. 40-page chapters, and I set a goal of a chapter a day; there were times when I got up at 2:00 am to finish that day's reading, while muttering "I will not let this book defeat me." Thankfully, author Selina Hastings keeps things moving along breezily. I'd compare this to the Jeffrey Meyers biography of Maugham if I remembered a thing about it, but we know how that goes.
June 30, 2024
Outstanding. My book of the year so far. Amazingly accomplished biography.
July 10, 2023
549 pages. I started with the Kindle version and quickly realized that I needed to read the hardback version (which I borrowed from my local library) to get the full sense and feeling of the life and times of this extraordinary man. Time stopped for 3 days while I immersed myself in this fascinating study. One of the best biographies I've ever read.
December 25, 2023
Maugham the writer was damn fine. I've enjoyed all of his novels to varying degrees of Goodreads stars, and think his short stories run the gamut from amazing to vaguely and uncomfortably racist.
Maugham the man, at least the Hastings portrait of Maugham, was really bitchy. He had a sharp, sharp tongue - like a Hollywood Squares middle square sort of tongue. I bet if Maugham were living today, he'd definitely be on the White Party circuit. He'd live in or near West Hollywood (I'm going to guess near rather than in, because he can have a tonier house in the Hollywood Hills). He would be impossibly tan. He would never eat anything, own lots of tank tops, and work out a lot. His Grindr profile would say "No fats, no femmes."
Hastings gives us a front row seat to his life (prolific in writing, but messy). She also gives us a front two seat to what man's story of being gay in the first half of the 20th century, and how that could make anyone bitchy as all hell. Not always a pleasant existence - but not exactly unpleasant either. Most people - including Maugham's (much detested) wife seemed to understand and know that he was queer. When Gerald, his partner of many years, died, he received condolences from around the world. He had plenty of sex too. PLENTY OF SEX. He was an attractive man for most of his life; he was also rich. That equals getting laid. A lot. Maugham was a sexual beast. Yet, being gay back in the day was incredibly difficult. You were always under the threat of arrest and exposure and blackmail and scandal. Everything you did and said had to be guarded, kept in the dark, hidden away. Tough times.
I did not come away from this book liking Somerset Maugham very much though, but I think Hastings did a smash up job of using Maugham's difficult and secret lives to explain why he was so unlikable. Her book was gossipy - but I don't feel like it was particularly cruel about it. I learned a lot about Maugham's life, how he wrote, why he wrote what he wrote, his inspirations. Much about his lovers and love affairs and his adventures (he was a spy during World War I).
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December 2023. Apparently, I’ve read this book before, and honestly, not all that long ago. I remember NOTHING about it, so I’m taking away a star. Other than that, the review I wrote back in 2018 still holds true.
November 21, 2019
Selina Hastings foi talvez a primeira biógrafa de Maugham a fazer seu trabalho após a "The Royal Literary Fund" como executores do legado literário do autor, revogar o impedimento de revelação que existia em relação a certos documentos e cartas, restrições impostas pelo próprio Somerset Maugham,
O trabalho de Selina e bem detalhado, mas como todo os seus biógrafos mantém um foco muito grande na sua homossexualidade ou bissexualidade, exatamente o motivo pelo qual Maugham havia colocado restrições em certos documentos. Afinal a homossexualidade na primeira metade do século 20 era crime na Inglaterra. Evidentemente Maugham tem muito mais a oferecer do que os detalhes de sua promiscuidade homossexual tão explorada pelos biógrafos em detrimento de questões mais importantes de sua excepcional obra.
Selina Hastings não fugiu á regra, mas seu trabalho não se baseia, como alguns outros biógrafos menos talentosos, em explorar exclusivamente este fato. Sua pesquisa é muito abrangente e fiel embora em algumas passagens ela parece confundir alguns personagens do autor como o próprio Maugham. Sabemos que Servidão Humana e Cakes and Ales tem muito do próprio Maugham, mas não é seguro assumir falas dos personagens como se fossem do próprio Maugham, embora em alguns casos isto até possa ser realidade.
Sou um aficionado por biografias e no caso particular como já me referi em outras de minhas resenhas um fã de Maugham. Esta biografia merece um lugar de destaque. Eu a recomendo e poderia conferir 5 estrelas, mas preferi ficar nas 4. Não acho que alguém jamais desvendará completamente William Somerset Maugham.
O trabalho de Selina e bem detalhado, mas como todo os seus biógrafos mantém um foco muito grande na sua homossexualidade ou bissexualidade, exatamente o motivo pelo qual Maugham havia colocado restrições em certos documentos. Afinal a homossexualidade na primeira metade do século 20 era crime na Inglaterra. Evidentemente Maugham tem muito mais a oferecer do que os detalhes de sua promiscuidade homossexual tão explorada pelos biógrafos em detrimento de questões mais importantes de sua excepcional obra.
Selina Hastings não fugiu á regra, mas seu trabalho não se baseia, como alguns outros biógrafos menos talentosos, em explorar exclusivamente este fato. Sua pesquisa é muito abrangente e fiel embora em algumas passagens ela parece confundir alguns personagens do autor como o próprio Maugham. Sabemos que Servidão Humana e Cakes and Ales tem muito do próprio Maugham, mas não é seguro assumir falas dos personagens como se fossem do próprio Maugham, embora em alguns casos isto até possa ser realidade.
Sou um aficionado por biografias e no caso particular como já me referi em outras de minhas resenhas um fã de Maugham. Esta biografia merece um lugar de destaque. Eu a recomendo e poderia conferir 5 estrelas, mas preferi ficar nas 4. Não acho que alguém jamais desvendará completamente William Somerset Maugham.
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