Category: Maugham

>Selina Hastings’s The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Review, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

What I find especially interesting about Maugham – and what I wished this biography addressed a little more intelligently than it did – is how fast his fame faded. As Hastings points out, Maugham’s works have even been adapted to the screen more times than Conan Doyle’s. Still, today almost everybody knows Conan Doyle, while Maugham’s name is familiar to a very narrow circle of readers. I only know his work so well because in the Soviet Union where I was born censorship limited our familiarity with English-speaking authors of the XXth century to those writers who remained completely untouched by Modernism and continued writing in the outdated realist style. And herein, I believe, lies the main reason for Maugham’s loss of popularity.

Hastings recognizes that

it was not done in highbrow circles to take [Maugham’s] writing seriously.

Incapable of finding an intelligent explanation of why Maugham was not seen as an equal by the artistic giants of his era, Hastings provides an answer of her own: they were jealous of his affluence, his big villa and his expensive limousine. Once again, one wishes that Hastings had some minimal familiarity with the development of literature in English. Maugham knew that he was consistently considered “a second-rate writer”, and it’s obvious that this knowledge was deeply painful to him. It is a disservice to the writer not to explore this issue and, instead, concentrate on excruciatingly boring sex lives of his numerous acquaintances.

Hastings’s inadequacy at a serious analysis of Maugham’s legacy reduces her to filling page after page with painstakingly researched minutiae of the author’s daily existence. We find out the names of everybody who visited this extremely hospitable writer at his villa, what the guests ate and drank, where they went after lunch and before afternoon tea. Hastings provides us with names and brief biographies of pretty much everybody Maugham met in his long and active life. We are even regaled with the knowledge that one of the writer’s male lovers used to sit in the patio of Maugham’s villa in pink shorts at a certain point in time, while another lover walked around in very short white shorts out of which his thighs bulged ridiculously, and that Maugham once won $12 at a game of cards (which was far from the only one he played in his life). This wealth of mundane details can be of interest only to the most assiduous of fans. Since I am not one of them, I found those pages of the The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography incredibly tedious.

This biographer’s tendency to disregard what really matters in favor of utterly trivial details manifests itself especially strongly in the last third of the book. Hastings mentions a couple of times in passing Maugham’s “socialist beliefs” but fails to elaborate what they consisted of and how this intensely snobbish writer who spent his life in a relentless pursuit of aristocrats managed to remain any kind of a socialist. Instead of discussing Maugham’s politics, a feat for which this biographer is signally unsuited, Hastings tells us at length what cars the author bought before and after the war, that writer Ian Fleming enjoyed beating his wife with wet towels, and what a lover of Maugham’s lover’s lover (no, there is no typo here) wrote in a letter that had nothing whatsoever to do with Maugham.

The entire effort that Hastings made in writing this book can be summed up in the words of one of my favorite colleagues: “Incompetents abound.”

[The first part of the review is located here]

Selina Hastings’s The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Review, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 32 Comments

I started my Thanksgiving break with a plan to relax completely and exorcise the accumulated exhaustion of a very difficult semester. In order to do that, I embarked on a project of reading Selina Hastings’s bulky biography of Somerset Maugham. In case you don’t know, W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was one of the most successful and popular British authors in the period between the two great wars. Today, most people don’t know Somerset Maugham and he isn’t widely read at all. His novel Of Human Bondage is still quite popular. However, his short stories and plays that made Maugham so famous have fallen out of favor with the readers. There are several reasons for that. For one, Maugham was a strong believer in the colonial system of the British Empire. His colonialism jumps off the pages of his short stories and is quite disgusting. He was also a vicious misogynist and made a career out of selling his contempt towards women. Maugham pretty much missed the boat of Modernism and kept writing in a plodding realist style, which was quite unsuited to the realities of the XXth century.

Obviously, Maugham’s colinialism and male chauvinism disgust me profoundly. Still, I have to confess that I have a secret love for his short stories because they are so beautifully crafted. It is my contention that before Julio Cortazar’s time, nobody could write a short story better than Maugham. If you have no idea what I’m on about, just read Maugham’s short story “The Lotus Eater” (which is available in open access online here) and you’ll see what I mean. Sadly, Maugham proved incapable of inscribing himself into the XXth century either ideologically or stylistically. He wasted his considerable gifts on pushing the outdated message of colonial and masculine domination, which is why his erstwhile fame is well-nigh forgotten nowadays.
Unfortunately, Selina Hastings lacks the most basic understanding of how to analyze literature. She could have definitely benefitted from taking at least a couple of literature classes. Then, she would have known, for example, that it is wrong to confuse the writer with his characters. She has this annoying habit of saying: “This is what Maugham felt/thought/did” and trying to prove that with a quote from his novel Of Human Bondage about the feelings, thoughts and actions of the novel’s protagonist Philip Carey. As autobiographical as that novel might have been, Carey and Maugham are not the same person. Trying to psychoanalyze the author on the basis of what his characters say or do is the kind of a rookie mistake that a serious literary biographer should never commit. Whenever Hastings attempts to offer an analysis of one of Maugham’s works, she invariably slips into the language of a seventh-grader’s book report:

One of Maugham’s greatest strengths as a novelist is his ability to create three-dimensional characters, women as well as men, interacting with one another.

Imagine that. A novelist writes about men – and even women – who actually interact with one another. This surprising fact definitely needed addressing in the writer’s biography.

Given to hero-worshipping her subject, Hastings manages not to notice his vitriolic hatred of women. She goes as far as suggesting that the opposite is the case. For this biographer, Maugham was

a man who enjoyed the company of women, who in his fiction and his friendships was so understanding and compassionate toward them.

I wouldn’t be able to address Maugham’s friendships with women (although I do know – and Hastings offers ample proof for my opinion – that he treated his wife and daughter abominably), but as for his writing, it isn’t often that one encounters an author who has done quite as much as Maugham to create a gallery of horrible, nasty, disgusting, stupid, venal, brainless women. It is unsurprising that Hastings, who can construct a turn of phrase as atrocious as


doctors, diplomats, traders, missionaries, and their women

would be incapable of noticing Maugham’s misogyny. Hastings is so blindly uncritical of Maugham’s every word, position, and action that she quite sincerely suggests that one of the reasons why Maugham’s marriage was such a disaster was that


the traditional feminine occupations of knitting and needlework held no appeal for [his wife] whatsoever.

Of course, it is just as probable that the marriage suffered more because of the fact that the traditional husbandly occupation of having sex with his wife held no appeal whatsoever for Maugham, who was gay. Hastings, however, chooses to demonize Maugham’s long-suffering wife Syrie for not learning to knit, which, as Hastings seems to believe, would have distracted her from her husband’s numerous homosexual affairs and turned this marriage into an endless bliss.

[Find Part II of the review here.]