William Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham: The Front Row of the Second-Raters

By the time he died there were eighty million copies of his books in print, two million of them added in his final year alone, and *The Razor's Edge* had sold more than five million since 1944. He wrote for four hours every morning in a villa on Cap Ferrat staffed by thirteen servants. Asked where he stood, he placed himself "in the very front row of the second-raters" and predicted that one or two of his comedies would last a while and a few short stories would end up in anthologies. It remains the most quoted piece of literary self-assessment in English, and the most contested.

Born in an Embassy

He was delivered on 25 January 1874 inside the British Embassy in Paris - a deliberate arrangement, since birth on embassy ground kept him out of the reach of French conscription law. He spent his first decade in France. His mother died in 1882 and his father two years later, and the orphaned boy was sent to England to live with his uncle, the vicar of Whitstable, in a household he remembered as emotionally arid. The abrupt transfer from a French childhood to an English vicarage left him with a stammer and a permanent sense of being an observer rather than a participant, which he later converted into a working method.

Whitstable and Canterbury

He was at King's School, Canterbury, from 1885 to 1890 and disliked nearly all of it. He went next to the University of Heidelberg to read literature and philosophy, and there began his first relationship with a man, John Ellingham Brooks. Germany gave him what Canterbury had not: the assumption that a life could be constructed to one's own specification.

The Doctor Who Quit

From 1892 to 1897 he trained at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in Lambeth, delivering babies in some of the poorest streets in London. The material went straight into *Liza of Lambeth* (1897), a slum novel published the year he qualified as a physician. He never practised. The clinical training, though, is audible in everything he wrote afterwards: the diagnostic detachment, the refusal to be shocked, the assumption that a human being is best understood by watching what they do rather than by listening to what they say about themselves.

Four Plays at Once

The theatre made him rich first. *Lady Frederick* ran for 422 performances in 1907, and by 1908 he had four plays running simultaneously in the West End, a feat without precedent in London. He wrote thirty-two plays in all and gave the form up entirely in 1933, at the height of his command of it - a characteristically unsentimental decision by a writer who treated his career as a business he happened to be good at.

Of Human Bondage

*Of Human Bondage* appeared in 1915: the long, semi-autobiographical novel of a club-footed medical student destroyed and remade by an obsession with a waitress, and the book on which his serious reputation rests. *The Moon and Sixpence* followed in 1919, *The Painted Veil* in 1925, *Cakes and Ale* in 1930 and *The Razor's Edge* in 1944. The short stories, many of them set in the colonial outposts of Asia and the South Seas, are for many readers the greater achievement - compressed, merciless, and built on the assumption that respectable people are usually concealing something specific.

Ashenden, Haxton and the Villa

During the First World War he drove an ambulance, then worked for British intelligence, running operations from Geneva and being sent to Russia in 1917 in an unsuccessful attempt to keep the Provisional Government in the war. Out of it came *Ashenden* (1928), a sequence of stories that stripped espionage of romance and did more than any other book to invent the modern spy novel; Graham Greene and John le Carré both worked in the space it opened.

His private life ran on two tracks. He married Syrie Wellcome in 1917 and had a daughter, Liza; the marriage was unhappy and lasted twelve years. The central relationship of his life was with Gerald Haxton, his secretary and companion for three decades, who travelled with him through Asia and the Pacific and, being far more sociable than the stammering Maugham, drew out of strangers the confidences that became the stories. After Haxton's death in 1944 Alan Searle took the role. From 1925 he lived at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat, entertaining on a scale that made him a semi-public figure, and there he wrote every morning by the discipline he insisted on: "Writing is a wholetime job. No professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it."

Why Somerset Is Called a Genius

The case for Maugham is a case about craft rather than vision, and he made it against himself with more force than his critics ever managed. What he possessed to an exceptional degree was narrative economy: a prose style so spare that TIME, assessing him at his death, singled out the absence of unnecessary adjectives and ornament, and a structural instinct for dramatising character through action instead of explaining it. That is a genuinely rare cognitive gift. It requires knowing, at every sentence, exactly how much a reader needs and refusing to supply more, and it is the reason his stories survive translation, adaptation and a century of changing taste. The medical training and the stammer both fed it - he watched people because he had been trained to and because he was not comfortable talking to them.

The counter-case was the critical consensus for most of his life. Highbrow reviewers were dismissive, Virginia Woolf among them; the recurring charges were reliance on cliche and a shortage of psychological depth, and TIME's own obituary conceded that critics questioned the depth of his insights even while praising his skill. Maugham himself observed that only two important critics in his country had ever troubled to take him seriously. His famous placement of himself in the front row of the second-raters is quoted as proof of clear-sightedness, but the record is muddier than the legend: researchers have found no evidence he ever described himself as "second-rate" in the flat form usually attributed to him, and he disputed that version. The fair verdict is that Maugham was not a great original - he opened no new territory in the novel and had no philosophy to offer beyond a bleak tolerance - but that he was among the most complete technicians English fiction has produced, and that four generations of better-regarded writers, Noel Coward and George Orwell and Greene and le Carre among them, learned from him how to do it.

Legacy

He was made a Companion of Honour by Elizabeth II in 1954, having reportedly turned down a knighthood in the hope of the Order of Merit, which never came. Before returning to Cap Ferrat after the Second World War he endowed the Somerset Maugham Award for British writers under thirty-five, which has since launched a long line of careers. He died on 16 December 1965, aged ninety-one, after a fall, and his ashes were placed at King's School, Canterbury - the school he had hated - beside the library he paid for. His American publishers counted four and a half million copies sold in his lifetime; the global figure at his death was eighty million. The stories are still being filmed. He was, in the end, more right about his prospects than the critics were.

Achievements

• Notable work: Of Human Bondage
• Notable work: The Razor's Edge