CORNUCOPIA OF MAUGHAM

Press, 30 August 1980, Page 17

CORNUCOPIA OF MAUGHAM

Somerset Maugham. By Ted Morgan. Jonathan Cape, 1980. 711 pp. $29.95.

(Reviewed by

Stephen Erber)

“ Why writers should' be more esteemed the older- they . grow’,. has long perplexed me .. ..When he was a young fellow in the sixties . . . his position in the world of letters was only respectable ... He celebrated his seventieth birthday ... it grew evident that'there had lived-among us all. these years, a great novelist... At eighty he was the Grand Old Man of English Letters. This position he held till his death.” This was not written of Maugham, but by him in “Cakes and Ale” in 1930 when he was aged 66. It was his waspish comment on the praise heaped upon the memory of the aged Thomas Hardy thinly disguised in Maugham’s hovel as Edward Driffield. Yet by the time he was 80, Maugham expected and accepted similar praise and position. It was the failure by those whose critical, but favourable judgments he courted, to. regard him as a “Great Man of English Letters” which soured him, although he denied it, He was, after all, the most successful writer since Dickens. His life was not so successful. Maugham’s instruction to his literary executor was that he must not assist anyone who might wish to write a biography of him. Happily his executor decided to assist Mr Morgan — and with most . splendid results. There can be little doubt that this is a fine biography about a major writer. From the cornucopia of previously withheld information amassed by Mr Morgan, has emerged as complete a description of Maugham’s life and

work as could be hoped for, written with tact, wit, balance and style. Somerset Maugham, born in 1874, was 91 when he died. During his life he saw a : great deal of the world and of people.-He was a medical student, a British secret agent, and an ardent - traveller. It is for what he derived from, and wrote about his travels, that he is best remembered. Malaya became known as “Maugham Country.” He collected people’s private stories and scandals, and with few amendments, published them — as fiction, of course — so that by 1938 he was unwelcome there. Those who had hosted him and confided in him felt betrayed by the • fictional, but accurate, portrayal of their delights and their delicts. His own life was no noble story. He lacked real (not necessarily monetary) charity, and he possessed a trait of unwavering vindictiveness. He used and discarded friends, so that it . is scarcely surprising that only two of 30 writer-friends approached to compile a Festschrift on his eightieth birthday, agreed to do so. He married once and disastrously — the disaster being caused partly because he could not stand his wife whom he treated disgracefully, and partly because of his homosexual attachment for his secretary, Gerald Haxton. He acted towards his daughter Liza discreditably, egged on (or at least not discouraged) by Haxton’s replacement — Maugham’s “pocket Iago” — allan Searle. Initially through his marriage, and later in the slipstream of powerful and famous friends, he sought respectability. He did not want to be known, in Quentin Crisp’s crisp phrase, as one of “the stately homos of England.” He wanted to be known as the G.O.M. of Twentieth Century English Letters.

From a literary point of view, the “Maugham Problem” is — where does he stand in English literature? Throughout his working life he had many contemporaries — from Kipling, Conrad, Wells and Hardy, through Joyce, Bennett, Lawrence, through Greene, Waugh and Hemingway to Salinger and Updike. He was often mentioned with distinguished literary company, but he was not, and he knew he was not, often rated with them. His explanation was that he was not as-others were — he was a story teller. “Though I am not less concerned than another with the disorder of the world, the injustice of , social conditions, the confusion of politics, I have not thought the novel was the best medium for uttering views on these subjects; unlike many o f my more distinguished contemporaries. I have felt no inclinations to preach or prophesy.” Maybe his style was not the best. Perhaps he was not the literary or intellectual spokesman for an age or generation, but he was a best-seller because he' wrote well and because “he had an inestimable gift of story telling.” He wrote honest books about what he knew, syntax and grammar imperfect, (Eddie Marsh making corrections where vital) with no talent or inclination for the "literary applepolishing” of James or Mansfield. Cyril Connelly, a formidable critic, (and admittedly a friend) perhaps best summed up where Maugham stood: “.. .if all else perish, there will remain a story teller’s* world from Singapore to the Marquesas that is exclusively and forever Maugham; a world of veranda and prahu ...” This is a most excellent, complete and' impressive work about Maugham and his world.