In my 20s they said I was brutal

January 25, 2024 1:37 AM

Today on the 150th birthday of W. "Willie" Somerset Maugham, prolific author of plays, novels and short stories, he sums up his life in letters [1m50s].

His play The Circle is showing in Cambridge (England) until Saturday 27 Jan 24. My Maugham Collection Concordance Library says it on the tin. In Cakes and Ale Maugham savaged fellow authors Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. Tan Twan Eng's new novel, The House of Doors, [NPR review] does a Maugham on the man himself. Maugham could be a bit of a shit [1m50s], but Frederic Raphael was impressed [3m20s] although he missed a Toulouse-Lautrec trick at Villa Mauresque . . . where you can stay [€250/room]. If you have to read one thing by Maugham let it be The Verger [2800 words].

posted by BobTheScientist (13 comments total)

Villa Mauresque . . . where you can stay [€250/room]

Some are set up in
the Somerset Maugham suite...
posted by chavenet at 2:02 AM on January 25 [4 favorites]

I read The Razor's Edge when I was about 20, and I think it had a very positive effect on me. It's probably not... a great book, but it can be the right book for the right person at the right time. Which is maybe a more valuable quality than "greatness".
posted by Alex404 at 2:40 AM on January 25 [9 favorites]

Yeah, I read the Razor's Edge, it too. Meh.
posted by falsedmitri at 2:47 AM on January 25

Of Human Bondage was a great favorite of mine around age 15, it was one of the first times I picked up a "classic" novel without any expectations and tore through it. I've never reread it, and I doubt it would have the same impact thirty years later - even at fifteen I found the protagonist's relationship with the tea shop waitress to be deeply frustrating. But for where I was, it was a great book.
posted by fortitude25 at 3:40 AM on January 25

Recently a friend tried to convince me The Razor's Edge, read by a 20something young man, was a good book. I had to take his word for it because I had opted for Of Human Bondage and that ended my foray into W. Somerset's oeuvre.
posted by From Bklyn at 5:29 AM on January 25

Maugham described himself as being in the first rank of the second-raters. That feels right. I've read several of his novels and a stack of his short stories, each time appreciating and enjoying them but not feeling that special lift of great books. Yet every few years I come back and read more.

Maugham was a mass entertainer, the king of the magazine short story and a major playwright. He was a storyteller and a very popular one. Gore Vidal said, "It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.” To quote further from "Maugham's Half & Half," Vidal's 1990 essay on him in the NYRB:

"Maugham spent his first twenty-six years in the nineteenth century and for the subsequent sixty-five years he was very much a nineteenth-century novelist and playwright. In many ways he was fortunately placed, though he himself would not have thought so. He was born in Paris where his lawyer father did legal work for the British Embassy, and his mother was a popular figure in Paris society. Maugham’s first language was French and although he made himself into the premier English storyteller, his prose has always had a curious flatness to it, as if it wanted to become either Basic English or Esperanto or perhaps go back into French."

(The essay is a tremendous read. Vidal's essays are always tremendous reads. I'd link to it, but I can't find an ungated version. It's available in print in Vidal's essay collection "United States" and, I think, is included in the Everyman Library edition of the collected short stories of Maugham.)

He lived as a closeted queer man in unforgiving times, had been a practicing doctor in the London slums for several years, spied for British intelligence during the First World War, and walked among the famous and notable. Unsurprisingly, his fiction centered on the split between appearances and truths, a rich soil for any writer.

My own favorites of his novels are Cakes and Ale and The Moon and Sixpence, both romans a clef about artists, Thomas Hardy and Paul Gauguin, respectively. Both are satisfying reads, good stories well told. Of his short stories, the five or six stories about the spy Ashenden are entertaining, and the stories "Rain" and "The Letter" are famous for good reason.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 5:38 AM on January 25 [11 favorites]

He is still in print, no mean feat for a popular novelist. His spy service in WW1 inspired the Ashenden stories, which are worth reading.

Terry Teachout's review of Selena Hasting's biography is also worth reading.

Vidal's essays are always tremendous reads.

I'll agree. I'll add that Vidal's essays are better than his novels, which arguably can also be said of Maugham's work. Sorry, oeuvre.
posted by BWA at 6:02 AM on January 25 [1 favorite]

The Narrow Corner is my favorite Maugham, but I know I should read more.
posted by OHenryPacey at 7:13 AM on January 25

I read The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng late last year, having picked it up on a recommendation with no idea that Maugham featured as a character. I also read The Razor's Edge at an impressionable age (closer to 15 than 20, I suspect) and found it impactful, though less so on a more recent reading.

House of Doors has made me want to read more of his later work after he'd travelled more, and has also sparked enough interest that I'll probably check out a biography some time this year.
posted by terretu at 10:08 AM on January 25

I think of him as a short story writer.

His four collections, (Ashenden is the third set and probably the weakest) are excellent exhibitions of that craft. His novels I don't care for. There seems to be something missing from them. (I've started Of Human Bondage and will finish it one day. It wasn't the quality of writing which caused me to break off. )

Pick any of the four short story collections and you will find them very rewarding.
posted by devious truculent and unreliable at 10:16 AM on January 25

nice post. my father was nicknamed after a Maugham character and legally changed it at 18.
posted by clavdivs at 2:23 PM on January 25

I have aspirations to visit, Africa, Shri Lanka and Malaya where Somerset Maugham travelled and wrote and stay in the Grand Hotels he references.
posted by Narrative_Historian at 8:15 PM on January 28

I also tore through Maugham's novels as a young man. I reread some of them them recently and still appreciated them. I did not know that he could be a massive shit, that's disappointing. What I love most in his stories is how he weaves in a subtle and nuanced, but strong, morality. He doesn't go for the whore-with-a-golden heart sentimentality, for example, instead he shows how a sex worker can be a better person than a preacher based on how the two characters behave towards others. This is not groundbreaking stuff. Yet he presents the story in a calm, unhurried style that obscures his judgement until the final pages. These days, I like calm and unhurried.
posted by SnowRottie at 8:19 AM on January 30