Unrequited Maugham
by Julia M. Klein
JUNE 13, 2010 TAGS:
“The writer is more concerned to know than to judge,” declares the narrator of Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919), seeking to excuse his fascination with the amoral artist Charles Strickland.
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Selina Hastings adopts a similar stance in her superlative new biography, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (Random House). Hastings is the award-winning biographer of two other British writers, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Here she offers an intimate, engrossing and balanced account of Maugham’s complicated romantic and sexual history, his service as a British spy during both world wars, and his unusually prolific writing career. While Maugham systematically destroyed all his personal correspondence, many of his friends, despite his entreaties, did not, and his executors, after decades of secrecy, allowed Hastings access to his papers. She also drew on a transcript of what she calls “a detailed recording” about the writer’s “private and domestic life,” made by Liza Maugham, his only child.
The result is deeply rewarding, a great melodrama worthy of Maugham. Hastings treats her subjects -- from Syrie Wellcome, his chic but abrasive wife, to his longtime companions Gerald Haxton and Alan Searle – with a mixture of unvarnished honesty and compassion. Despite his callousness to Syrie and his hopelessness as a father, Maugham (1874-1965) emerges as a witty and generally likable fellow, constrained – like many of his own characters – by unhappy circumstances. Hastings writes: “And yet for all his elaborate defenses Maugham remained intensely vulnerable; he was a passionate, difficult man, capable of cruelty as well as of great kindness and charm, but despite all his worldly success he never found what he wanted. His miserable marriage wrecked years of his existence, and the great love of his life remained unrequited.”
The first tragedy in Maugham’s life was the death of his beloved mother from consumption when he was just 8. His father’s death from cancer followed two years later, and William Somerset Maugham, the youngest of four brothers, was sent from his childhood home in France to England to be raised in a vicarage by his aunt and uncle. His tribulations at the vicarage, and later at school, where he was plagued by a stammer, were less than Dickensian. But neither environment offered much warmth, and Maugham escaped when he could. He trained as a doctor, drawing his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), from the stories of patients in the London slums.
While Hastings describes Maugham’s sexual proclivities as mainly homosexual (in the Edwardian era, no one was yet “gay”), she credits him with genuine attractions to women – “the fact of his bisexuality,” she calls it. “I tried to persuade myself,” she quotes him as saying, “that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer – whereas really it was the other way around.”
In her telling, Maugham – “magnetically attractive to both sexes as a young man” -- had not just heterosexual affairs, but loves. The most significant was the tolerant, promiscuous and good-natured Sue Jones. Maugham proposed marriage to Jones, and Hastings speculates that his life would have been far different if only she had accepted. The unconventional Jones was aware of and apparently unfazed by Maugham’s homosexual liaisons, but in his absence she had met – and become pregnant by – someone else. Maugham ended up the reluctant husband of Syrie, with whom he had little in common except a child, Liza, also conceived out of wedlock.
The mismatch was worsened, ironically, by Syrie’s intense love for Maugham, which he found burdensome and could never return. He reserved his true affections for the rakish, extroverted Haxton, who served as his secretary and traveling companion for three decades. Though some of Maugham’s friends disdained Haxton as a dissipated cad, Hastings credits him with charm, vivacity, intellect and a key role in helping Maugham meet the people whose stories would animate his fiction. His presence in Maugham’s life (understandably) maddened Syrie, and, after much mutual rancor, the two finally divorced.
Maugham and his much-younger companion lived together at the Villa Mauresque, on the French Riviera. Haxton ran the household and organized the parties, while Maugham produced the plays, stories and novels that would make him inordinately wealthy. Eventually, Haxton would succumb to both alcoholism and compulsive gambling, rendering Maugham as unhappy as he had made Syrie. Shortly after they agreed to separate, Haxton died of tuberculosis in 1944, with a grief-stricken Maugham by his side.
He would be replaced as secretary and companion by Alan Searle, a longtime lover and correspondent of Maugham’s. Searle, of working-class origins, had a calmer temperament than Haxton, but only a modest intellect, and some crucial flaws: He unaccountably hated Maugham’s daughter and, Hastings reveals, was instrumental in engineering a breakdown of their relationship in Maugham’s tragic final years.
Amid romantic upheavals, Maugham’s greatest love was always his writing, to which he devoted every morning. He won fame and fortune as a dramatist, excelled as a short story writer, and is remembered largely for his novels, including Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence and The Razor’s Edge (1944). His realism, at a time when modernism was challenging traditional narrative approaches, made him unfashionable with critics. But his themes – including the conflict between the individual and stifling social convention – had a modernity of their own.
Maugham’s storytelling gifts fitted his work perfectly to both large and small screen, bringing his creations to even wider audiences. One play, The Letter (1927), inspired two movies and two television adaptations. Film adaptations continue to appear, most recently The Painted Veil (2004) and Becoming Julia (2006), based on his novel Theatre (1937). His dramas – once wildly popular in both England and the United States -- have never become canonical, but his 1926 comedy of manners, The Constant Wife, was successfully revived five years ago on Broadway with Kate Burton, Lynn Redgrave and Michael Cumpsty.
Hastings excels at mining Maugham’s work for autobiographical clues, a sometimes problematic venture. While not a penetrating work of literary criticism, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham is nevertheless much more than juicy gossip. It offers a searching look at how, from the raw material of his own failed loves, the tragedies of others, and the exotic backdrops of the Far East and South Seas, Maugham produced fiction that remains compelling today.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review.
Selina Hastings adopts a similar stance in her superlative new biography, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (Random House). Hastings is the award-winning biographer of two other British writers, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Here she offers an intimate, engrossing and balanced account of Maugham’s complicated romantic and sexual history, his service as a British spy during both world wars, and his unusually prolific writing career. While Maugham systematically destroyed all his personal correspondence, many of his friends, despite his entreaties, did not, and his executors, after decades of secrecy, allowed Hastings access to his papers. She also drew on a transcript of what she calls “a detailed recording” about the writer’s “private and domestic life,” made by Liza Maugham, his only child. The result is deeply rewarding, a great melodrama worthy of Maugham. Hastings treats her subjects -- from Syrie Wellcome, his chic but abrasive wife, to his longtime companions Gerald Haxton and Alan Searle – with a mixture of unvarnished honesty and compassion. Despite his callousness to Syrie and his hopelessness as a father, Maugham (1874-1965) emerges as a witty and generally likable fellow, constrained – like many of his own characters – by unhappy circumstances. Hastings writes: “And yet for all his elaborate defenses Maugham remained intensely vulnerable; he was a passionate, difficult man, capable of cruelty as well as of great kindness and charm, but despite all his worldly success he never found what he wanted. His miserable marriage wrecked years of his existence, and the great love of his life remained unrequited.”
The first tragedy in Maugham’s life was the death of his beloved mother from consumption when he was just 8. His father’s death from cancer followed two years later, and William Somerset Maugham, the youngest of four brothers, was sent from his childhood home in France to England to be raised in a vicarage by his aunt and uncle. His tribulations at the vicarage, and later at school, where he was plagued by a stammer, were less than Dickensian. But neither environment offered much warmth, and Maugham escaped when he could. He trained as a doctor, drawing his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), from the stories of patients in the London slums.
While Hastings describes Maugham’s sexual proclivities as mainly homosexual (in the Edwardian era, no one was yet “gay”), she credits him with genuine attractions to women – “the fact of his bisexuality,” she calls it. “I tried to persuade myself,” she quotes him as saying, “that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer – whereas really it was the other way around.”
In her telling, Maugham – “magnetically attractive to both sexes as a young man” -- had not just heterosexual affairs, but loves. The most significant was the tolerant, promiscuous and good-natured Sue Jones. Maugham proposed marriage to Jones, and Hastings speculates that his life would have been far different if only she had accepted. The unconventional Jones was aware of and apparently unfazed by Maugham’s homosexual liaisons, but in his absence she had met – and become pregnant by – someone else. Maugham ended up the reluctant husband of Syrie, with whom he had little in common except a child, Liza, also conceived out of wedlock.
The mismatch was worsened, ironically, by Syrie’s intense love for Maugham, which he found burdensome and could never return. He reserved his true affections for the rakish, extroverted Haxton, who served as his secretary and traveling companion for three decades. Though some of Maugham’s friends disdained Haxton as a dissipated cad, Hastings credits him with charm, vivacity, intellect and a key role in helping Maugham meet the people whose stories would animate his fiction. His presence in Maugham’s life (understandably) maddened Syrie, and, after much mutual rancor, the two finally divorced. Maugham and his much-younger companion lived together at the Villa Mauresque, on the French Riviera. Haxton ran the household and organized the parties, while Maugham produced the plays, stories and novels that would make him inordinately wealthy. Eventually, Haxton would succumb to both alcoholism and compulsive gambling, rendering Maugham as unhappy as he had made Syrie. Shortly after they agreed to separate, Haxton died of tuberculosis in 1944, with a grief-stricken Maugham by his side.
He would be replaced as secretary and companion by Alan Searle, a longtime lover and correspondent of Maugham’s. Searle, of working-class origins, had a calmer temperament than Haxton, but only a modest intellect, and some crucial flaws: He unaccountably hated Maugham’s daughter and, Hastings reveals, was instrumental in engineering a breakdown of their relationship in Maugham’s tragic final years.
Amid romantic upheavals, Maugham’s greatest love was always his writing, to which he devoted every morning. He won fame and fortune as a dramatist, excelled as a short story writer, and is remembered largely for his novels, including Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence and The Razor’s Edge (1944). His realism, at a time when modernism was challenging traditional narrative approaches, made him unfashionable with critics. But his themes – including the conflict between the individual and stifling social convention – had a modernity of their own.
Maugham’s storytelling gifts fitted his work perfectly to both large and small screen, bringing his creations to even wider audiences. One play, The Letter (1927), inspired two movies and two television adaptations. Film adaptations continue to appear, most recently The Painted Veil (2004) and Becoming Julia (2006), based on his novel Theatre (1937). His dramas – once wildly popular in both England and the United States -- have never become canonical, but his 1926 comedy of manners, The Constant Wife, was successfully revived five years ago on Broadway with Kate Burton, Lynn Redgrave and Michael Cumpsty.
Hastings excels at mining Maugham’s work for autobiographical clues, a sometimes problematic venture. While not a penetrating work of literary criticism, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham is nevertheless much more than juicy gossip. It offers a searching look at how, from the raw material of his own failed loves, the tragedies of others, and the exotic backdrops of the Far East and South Seas, Maugham produced fiction that remains compelling today.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review.
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