Books: W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

“YEARS ago, when William Somerset Maugham was a young man of 64, he turned his thoughts to a subject of considerable importance to him: a fitting end to his own story. “Having held a certain place in the world for a long time,” Maugham wrote in The Summing Up, “I am content that others soon should occupy it. When nothing can be added without spoiling the design the artist leaves it.”

But the end was too long in coming: 27 years. The design was spoiled and it sorely strained the patience of the man who was dedicated to the idea that a well-constructed narrative should draw to a swift and orderly close. At his seaside villa on Cap Ferrat, going deaf and blind, Maugham complained bitterly at the way time’s slow hand was writing his last chapter. “I am sick of this way of life,” he said. “I want to die.” Earlier this month, he sank into a coma following a stroke. The 91-year-old heart beat six days longer in a hospital outside Nice. And then last week it stopped.

His death committed to posterity the work of one of the most productive, most popular, most successful and most versatile authors of the century. This year alone, some 2,000,000 copies of his books will be added to the 80 million already in print. The Razor’s Edge has sold more than 5,000,000 copies since its appearance in 1944. Of Human Bondage, published in 1915 when Maugham was 41, has entered literature courses and has been adapted three times to film. At least two Maugham characters—Mildred Rogers in Bondage and Sadie Thompson in Rain—belong to that distinctive fictional company that the world will not forget.

Characters in Action

Rich beyond most writers’ dreams, Maugham became a kind of semipublic personage, a figure of Edwardian origin and habits, projecting an Ed wardian image on modern scenes. He looked like a character from one of his own novels: heavily lined patrician features, thin lips turned down at the corners, hooded eyes. Traveling the world in search of stories, he napped after lunch wherever he happened to be—aboard a tramp ship plowing the South Seas, in a Burmese hut or an outrigger canoe. Churchill, Wells, Cocteau, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Kings of Sweden and Siam called on him at Villa Mauresque, his Moorish retreat on the Riviera where, working never more and never less than four hours a morning, he set down most of his books.

Though he got away from common men as soon as he could and avoided them when possible, it was from common men that his invention took flight. “The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements,” he once said. His boast was that “I could not spend an hour in anyone’s company without getting the material to write at least a readable story about him.”

For this, he was often described as a mere storyteller. Today, after Joyce and Freud, “storyteller” is somehow considered a term of denigration, and critics may reasonably question the depth of Maugham’s insights. But he was able to do supremely well what storytellers are supposed to do—to dramatize character by putting that character into action, a specific action that displays in kinetic terms his or her faults and virtues.

Measles and Rain

Maugham cites his own example. He once met a dull couple at a dull dinner. The man had been a civil servant in Asia, and the only memorable thing about him was that he was a onetime drunk, taking a bottle to bed with him every night and finishing it before morning. His wife seemed a drab mediocrity, but she had cured her husband of drink. Out of this, Maugham contrived a superb story (Before the Party), which begins in a prim country dwelling, turns into a confession by the fat widow that she had slashed her backsliding husband to death with a parang one hot afternoon in Borneo. After the confession, they all go to the vicar’s garden party.

Well, how many wives married to drunkards have not had the same impulse? And gone on to parties? Or take the case of Rain. Maugham saw a prostitute hurry aboard his Tahiti-bound boat. A missionary and his wife were also aboard, and on arrival in Pago Pago, the group was thrown into quarantine because of a measles epidemic. Maugham added a tropical rain season to the measles, and made the confrontation of missionary and whore into a classic contest between righteousness and sin. What man (or clergyman) has not felt the visceral taint of the sensual in his ostensibly selfless concern for a pretty sinner’s soul?

Maugham was by nature, and by his own admission, cold and withdrawn. “There are very few people who know anything about me. And even they do not know as much as they imagine.” He was a watcher, not a participant.

But if he was cold, it was because he was unwarmed. At ten, he was an orphan in a strange land. His father had been solicitor to the British embassy in Paris. His mother, afflicted with chronic tuberculosis, had had children at regular intervals on doctors’ advice —pregnancy was thought to be good for tuberculosis in those days—and eight years after Somerset’s birth she died. His father died soon thereafter. The boy was shipped off to England to become the unwanted ward of an uncle.

Shy, afflicted with a humiliating stammer, the young Maugham recoiled in misery from the hostile new environment. At the vicarage, his uncle pumped him so full of religion that Maugham ultimately rejected God; he remained a nonbeliever all his life. At King’s School in Canterbury, classmates and even the headmaster mocked his speech impediment. These unhappy transplanted years were later to appear in Of Human Bondage, the most intensely autobiographical of his novels. Even years later, he was unable to read it without tears.

The writer in Maugham emerged at medical school in London, where before getting his degree he waded systematically, if surreptitiously, through the classics and published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, in 1897. Maugham was 23. Liza was only a modest success, but on the strength of it, he abandoned medicine for good.

Within eleven years he had scored his stunning triumph on the London stage. The theater gave him just what he had hoped to get from it: money and fame. Both became fixtures of his life. When critics accused him of writing for mere profit, he countered by saying: “I’ve found out that money was like a sixth sense without which you could not make the most of the other five.”

Spareness and Clarity

Sudden success can overwhelm a budding talent. But to Maugham, it only brought the exhilarating privilege of doing exactly as he pleased, which was to master his craft: “The books I wrote during the first ten years were the exercises by which I sought to learn my business. Writing is a wholetime job. No professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.” He worked stubbornly at refining and paring down his style, inflicting on himself tedious hours of discipline. The result was a style so spare, so clear of the extraneous adjective or the decorative phrase that it almost escapes notice. But no major writer has been more ruth lessly candid, or more humble, about his own abilities. Despite the pains he had taken, he once confessed: “The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known—Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoevski—wrote their respective languages very badly. It proves that if you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.”

As for his own literary rank, Maugham himself had no doubts about where he belonged—”in the very front row of the second-raters.” That is not as modest a ranking as it might seem. Maugham himself put Stendhal, Voltaire and A. E. Housman there. “I think that one or two of my comedies will be remembered for a time and a few of my best short stories will find their way into anthologies,” he told a visitor in 1944. “This is not much, I’ll admit, but it is better than nothing.”