Somerset Maugham - Softcover

Playwright, short-story writer, novelist and essayist, Maugham achieved in a long life unparalleled commercial success. Aged 33 and at the height of his career, he had four plays running in the West End in the same week. Many of his novels were turned into films and Rain, his most famous short story, was filmed three times.
When Frederic Raphael was in his early twenties and Maugham just turned eighty, the writers met at Maugham's famous Cap Ferrat home. That occasion provided Raphael with some of the new material for this volume - a much-expanded edition of a monograph published in 1976. Raphael also explores, in this biography of a complicated personality, Maugham's idyllic childhood in France, miserable adolescence in England, and the pampered life he later led at his famous watering-hole on the Riviera, where he entertained - amongst others - the Windsors, the Aga Khan, H G Wells and Churchill. As Raphael says, for a stoic, he lived a good life as an epicurean.
Being, in his own words, three-quarters queer, Maugham nevertheless married Syrie Barnardo, daughter of the Dr. Barnardo. The marriage was a spectacular disaster. Maugham had already embarked on his first homosexual affair- with Gerald Haxton, his future secretary. Frederic Raphael illuminates the ways in which Maugham's sexuality acted as a 'humanizing factor', preventing what became 'dotty theorizing' in D H Lawrence, 'mandarin malice' in T S Eliot and Ezra Pound> and 'self-conscious sterility' in E M Forster.