The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham-Selina Hastings

Biography

 

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

Selina Hastings

 

Somerset Maugham was the most popular English author in the first half of twentieth century and the most successful playwright of this era. His books had sold eighty million copies in his life time. He earned huge money through his books and was the richest author of his time. But critical acclaim and the more prestigious awards like OBE and Noble, eluded him. His unconventional views and sexual life were responsible for this neglect by the intelligentsia. This dislike was aggravated by his unparalleled popularity amongst the reading public; an attribute particularly looked down upon by the high brows amongst critics. Though he professed to know his precise place in the hierarchy of English writers - ‘I know where I stand (in the gathering of literary luminaries), in the very front row of the back benchers’- and affected to bear this neglect with nonchalance, this slight rankled him lifelong.

 

There are few authors who have allowed so much of themselves to seep in to their writings as Maugham. Facts and fiction are inextricably mixed in his work. He innovated and mastered the technique of telling a story in first person singular. This gave an amazing verisimilitude to the narrative. His views on various aspects of life are frequently mouthed by his various characters and his books ‘Of Human Bondage’ and ‘Cakes and Ale’ are frankly autobiographical. He unabashedly modeled his characters on people he had known well in his life or had come across cursorily in his frequent travels, without any effort to mask the similarities. Many of his characters bear such an uncanny resemblance to himself that the ruse is clear to anyone who has a slight knowledge of Maugham, the man. But he also guarded his privacy zealously. He drew a line beyond which his fans and readers were not allowed access to facts concerning his personal life. All his life he vigorously dissuaded any attempt at his biography. In his last days a bonfire went up in the ‘Villa Mauresqe’, his home in French Riviera, where he burnt all his correspondence and urged all his colleagues to do the same to the letters that he had written them in his long life. He wrote three autobiographical books: ‘The Summing Up’ where he set forth his views on various topics that ‘have occupied me in my life’, ‘Strictly Personnel’ a memoir of his experiences while escaping from France during Second World War and ‘Looking Back’ a memoir that is product of a senile mind cankered with contempt and hatred for his ex-wife Syrie, a book condemned by all. He also published the much-pruned version of his voluminous notebooks as ‘A Writer’s Notebook’. He diligently edited the contents of his notebooks to erase any reference to an aspect of life he did not wish to reveal. After his death there was a spate of his biographies and in vanguard was his own nephew Robin Maugham, a minor writer of sorts.

 

Maugham led a colorful and varied life. He was an indefatigable traveler and roamed the world in search of material for his books. That he possessed a formidable talent is beyond dispute. But it is also generally believed that he lacked the innate skills of a born writer. He was only too well aware of this failing. Early in his life he resolved to hone the limited skills that he possessed and by the dint of sheer hard work and perseverance he achieved the pattern of life he had set out for himself. But this should not be construed to mean that he was a contented and happy man. He suffered from a disabling stammer all his life. By his own admission this had an immense effect in shaping his personality. He never ‘experienced the bliss of requited love’. The only unconditional love he ever received was from his mother who died when he was a little child of eight. He grew to be a homosexual. The rigorous mores of the English society then and his craving for respectability from the same society forced him to lead a life of concealment. Fate saw him married to a woman he never loved but he could not publicly acknowledge his true love.  Maugham was a very successful writer but a deeply unhappy man. These facets of his personality and life make his biography as interesting as any of his masterly crafted short stories.

 

Selina Hastings had access to such of Maugham’s correspondence as had survived the bonfires of Villa Mauresque and his exhortations to his friends to destroy them. She has made full use of these and quotes them freely. Her language is beautiful. She writes in a simple, lucid hand, the very qualities which distinguished Maugham’s prose. Book is extensively researched and is thoroughly enjoyable throughout its bulky length of six hundred pages in small print. She writes with remarkable nonchalance and detachedness. Much like the subject of the book, here is an aloof biographer who diligently and skillfully chronicles the life of this great teller of tales but without being judgmental. This is the best and most informative biography of Maugham that I have read till now. And before this I had read three. It will be an invaluable acquisition for a fan of Somerset Maugham. A few words about its title; ‘Secret Lives’ suggests a book dealing mainly with some sinister, little known aspect about its subject. But this is not so. There are only two aspects of Maugham’s life which can be called secret: His sexuality and his involvement in the two world wars. Any book on Maugham is incomplete without discussion about his sexuality and Selina Hastings does not attempt to sensationalize this issue, neither does she devote more space to it than needed. And since Maugham’s death, this is not a revealing bit of news even for the general reader, Maugham’s friends and enemies all being aware of his proclivities even in his lifetime. Maugham himself left an account of his involvement in the First World War in the form of his Ashenden stories which like his many other fiction work bears marked likeness to his actual experiences. Selina Hastings does reveal in some details Maugham’s employment as a British propaganda agent in United States during the Second World War, hitherto unrevealed in his earlier biographies. But these small revelations can hardly justify the use of the epithet ‘Secret Lives’. Perhaps even a book written so well as this, needs some subterfuge to attract readers.