Somerset Maugham Studies

Studies and appreciation of the writings of one of the most successful English writers of the 20th Century

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Features and discussions in progress by Professor Tim Crook PhD seeking to elevate interest in a writer now apparently out of fashion and not a strong source of interest in school and university literature courses.

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‘Commercial success on a large scale was the keynote of W. Somerset Maugham’s career. First as a playwright in the early years of the century, then as short-story writer, novelist and essayist’- said Frederic Raphael in 1976.

William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) may have been an astonishingly successful English writer but it can be argued that much of his identity and imagination existed abroad. As his father was the solicitor in the British Embassy in Paris that was where it was decided that he should be born.

He was sent to boarding school in England- for him a very unhappy experience. He went to a German university where he was happier.

From the middle of his teenage years he became the writer who lived to write. Because of his stammer his family decided courtroom advocacy and the legal profession had no future for him.

His family thought he could be a doctor instead where clinician to patient consultations could presumably bear the alleged imprecations of his speech impediment.

He studied at the famous St George’s Hospital Medical School on the south bank of the Thames overlooking the Houses of Parliament.

He did in fact qualify in 1897, but never practised, though his knowledge and training came in use when he drove ambulances on the Western Front at the beginning of the First World War.

Maugham was determined above all else to be a full-time writer.

The first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897) was a study of life in the slums and showed a great sympathy for the working-class and poverty-stricken people of south London. It was based on his personal experiences of treating the poor at St George’s.

But he made his name and first established his writing career first as a playwright.

Eleven years later he was the ‘leading lights’ author of the West End of London where he had four plays running at once.

He would continue writing, mostly successful plays, until 1933 when he had completed his thirty second.

It was in this year that he decided to turn his back on the stage and concentrate on his short story and novel writing.

His notable novels and books after Liza of Lambeth included:

He was regarded as one of the great quintessential short story writers of his age, and collections of his work in this genre were published in standalone volumes including:

The Casuarina Tree (1926)

The Mixture as Before (1940) and

The Round Dozen: Twelve “Long Short Stories” (1939)

His stories became a staple source for radio, television and cinema adaptations.

This included the 1933 screenplay adaptation of Maugham’s 1932 novel The Narrow Corner.

Though the first production of his work by BBC Radio and BBC Television would be his comedy play The Breadwinner.

The BBC described its inauguration on the National Radio Programme 16th April 1935 as ‘the first stage play by Somerset Maugham to be done on the air, and it will be the first time Ronald Squire has acted before a microphone.’

It was also produced for the BBC’s early television service from Alexandra Palace on 7th November 1938.

In an article for Literature/Film Quarterly in 1978, the academic Robert L. Calder observed that because Maugham’s works had been produced into some forty films and hundreds of radio and television plays ‘it would be fair to say that no other serious writer’s work has been so often presented in other media.’

Maugham became victim to the critical construction of high brow and low brow literature- a kind of literary eugenics that became fashionable and somewhat ideological in modernist criticism.

His crime was his great popularity, and the kind of sales which the Bloomsbury set and authors who thought they were artistically superior, were highly jealous of.

Any literary quality they had to concede in Maugham’s writings would be reduced to the adjective ‘competent.’

It can be strongly argued that his prose, particularly when inspired by autobiographical sensibility, produced masterpieces of fiction such as the novel Of Human Bondage.

His Ashenden series of spy stories made a contribution to the genre of espionage literature which has not perhaps been fairly and fully appreciated. John Le Carré and company owe him a great debt.

He was lucid writer who captured the multi-faceted and emotional nuances of human character and condition and was perhaps over-criticised for his use of clichés from the everyday language of his time.

Maugham was awarded a medal for his First World War ambulance driving service, but his bigger contribution to the Great War was his undercover work for the British Secret Service in Switzerland and Russia.

He had a complicated sexual identity living with male companions such as Gerald Haxton and Alan Searle for most of his life. In his earlier years he attempted to conform to heteroxexual mores through a three year affair with Syrie Wellcome followed by a twelve year marriage with her from 1917.

They had one daughter called Liza.

Maugham travelled and lived abroad for most of his adult life; particularly after his Secret Service career.

His extended visits to Asia, the South Seas and other places provided the scenes, settings and characters for his fiction.

His main home would be the Villa La Mauresque at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera near Nice.

He would give up writing novels after the Second World War and passed away at his villa in the South of France in 1965 at the age of 91.

The Society of Authors administers the Somerset Maugham annual awards- W. Somerset ‘Maugham set up a fund in 1947 to enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience of foreign countries. The awards are given for a published work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry.’

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