Although critical acclaim eluded him, W Somerset Maugham enjoyed considerable popular success during his lifetime. C A R Hills looks back on a writer whose work still resonates today
W Somerset Maugham's status is ambiguous. His death is now almost 40 years in the past. Although he was famous in his lifetime, his reputation was mainly a popular one. Many critics despised him. But today, in every branch of Waterstone's, there is a long row of his works; in rural France, in Athens or in Lisbon you can easily pick up a second-hand volume to read on holiday. It is difficult to think of another author born in the 1870s who remains with us to the same extent.
I myself fell in love with his works as a teenager and, as the French say, on n'aime qu'une fois, la premiere. After many years of not being able to read him, I have returned to him in troubled middle age. I have a theory that every literary teenager falls in love with either Maugham or Virginia Woolf, and that no one will ever fully see the appeal of these writers if they do not know it then.
He was born rather later than, say, Hardy or Gissing, but his readership rivals theirs, and his reputation will be comparable.
What is it about him, I wonder, that I find so appealing? I find his works enjoyable as stories and as writing, but that may be because they now fit me like an old coat. No, I think he persistently addresses an emotional dichotomy that is at the centre of my own life. It is the conflict between the need for detachment from others, and the feeling that to lack commitment is an irrecoverable disaster.
This is the theme to which Maugham returns again and again. His most famous novel, after all, is called Of Human Bondage. The hero rather unconvincingly finds a good and sensible partnership at the end, but it is his hopeless passion for the dreadful waitress Mildred, humiliating and inescapable, that remains long in the mind. In The Razor's Edge, Larry Darrell rejects love in his search for spiritual enlightenment, but paradoxically, being loved by him would have been the only chance of redemption for his childhood sweetheart, Isabel.
He destroys her soul in saving his. There is always that bitter twist in Maugham, and if it brings you as much sadness as satisfaction you will acknowledge him as the Master.
In his play The Constant Wife, which I saw recently in London, five society women come on stage soon after the curtain rises and engage in artificial chatter. We seem to be in the utterly conventional stage world of the 1920s. By the end of the second act, we are uneasy in this judgement, but wondering how Maugham will deepen the situation of marital infidelity. Then as the curtain falls and John Middleton has to beg his wife to come back on any terms, we find the author has delivered the coup de theatre and the blow of emotional truth.
His novels tend to fall away at the end when the cautious professional writer, anxious above all to conceal his homosexuality, takes over and some vital fence is not taken. In his short stories, he is free from structural weakness, and what a feast of disappointment these provide. If I were to choose just one story, it would be "Red", that quintessence of the bitter-sweet.
Maugham's career lasted more than 60 years, and he won success in every genre except poetry. There is no writer whom it is more impossible to picture as a poet. His style is cliched, and irredeemably plain. But this establishes an equality with his readers which is of great importance to them. They sense in him something as bare and desperate as themselves.
I am particularly fond of the four short novels that Maugham published in the 1930s, when he was the absolute master of the Villa Mauresque, conjuring and dismissing guests and fictions alike with a swipe of his prognathous jaw. The first, Cakes and Ale, is very well known, but the other three are underrated. The Narrow Corner (1932) was the novel in which Maugham finally approached the topic of homosexuality, and a sexy tale of the Indonesian shipping lanes it is!
Theatre (1937), the story of a meretricious actress, her husband and her lover, is the most worldly even of Maugham's fictions, but it has an episode towards the end - Julia's stay in France with her mother and aunt - that is just long enough, in its old-world sweetness, to humanise the cynicism. And Christmas Holiday (1939), slighter than the others, contains one of the best portraits of a happy murderer in fiction.
We are told of Maugham himself that when his guests at the Villa Mauresque turned up, he would appear at the door with arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome. But as they approached nearer and nearer, the arms would fall to his sides. In such a warm embrace endlessly deferred, Maugham will hold me all my life.
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