1921 somerset maugham biography

I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief; I saw the dark lines that despair drew on a face. He made himself comfortable there, filled many notebooks with literary ideas, and continued writing nightly, while studying for his medical degree. It drew its details from his obstetric duties in South London slums. He wrote near the opening of the novel: " The Evening Standard commented that there had not been so powerful a story of slum life since Rudyard Kipling 's The Record of Badalia Herodsfootand praised the author's "vividness and knowledge His 1921 somersets maugham biography have an astounding amount of vitality".

He later said, "I took to it as a duck takes to water. He found Mediterranean lands much to his liking, for what his biographer Frederic Raphael calls their "douceur de vivre missing under grim English skies". Between and he wrote two more plays, a travel book and two novels, but his next big commercial and critical success did not come until Octoberwhen his comedy Lady Frederick opened at the Court Theatre in London.

Between and the outbreak of the First World War inMaugham wrote a further eight plays, [44] but his stage successes did not completely distract him from writing novels. His supernatural thriller The Magician had a principal character modelled on Aleister Crowleya well-known occultist. Crowley took offence and wrote a critique of the novel in Vanity Faircharging Maugham with "varied, shameless and extensive" plagiarism.

Looking back, he described his early attempts to be heterosexual as the greatest mistake in his life. He told his nephew Robin"I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer — whereas really it was the other way round". She was married to the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcomebut the couple had formally separated inafter which she had a succession of partners, including the retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge.

Among his colleagues was Frederick Gerald Haxtona young San Franciscan, who became his lover and companion for the next thirty years, but the affair between Maugham and Syrie Wellcome continued. The critic John Sutherland says of it: One of the more favourable initial reviews, quoted in Maugham's British publisher's advertisement, August The hero, Philip Carey, suffers the same childhood misfortunes as Maugham himself: the loss of his mother, the breakup of his family home, and his emotionally straitened upbringing by elderly relatives.

In addition, Carey has a club foota disability which commentators equate with either Maugham's stammer or his homosexuality. Raphael comments that there is no firm evidence for this, [5] [53] and Meyers suggests that she is based on Harry Phillips, a young man whom Maugham had taken to Paris as, nominally, his secretary for a prolonged stay in He successfully sued for divorce inciting Maugham as co-respondent.

His fluency in French and German was an advantage, and for a year he worked in Geneva — at his own expense — as an agent for the British Secret Service. Syrie and Liza were with him for part of the year, providing a convincing domestic cover, and his profession as a writer enabled him to travel about and stay in hotels without attracting attention.

He was, by his own account, not a particularly imaginative or inventive person, but he studied people and places and used them, sometimes with minimal alteration or disguise, in his stories. Bywhen the collapse of France forced Maugham to leave the French Riviera and become a well-heeled refugee, he was already one of the most famous writers in the English-speaking world, and one of the wealthiest.

Grand Old Man of letters Maugham, by now in his sixties, spent most of World War II in the United Statesfirst in Hollywood he worked on many scripts, and was one of the first authors to make significant money from film adaptations and later in the South. While in the US he was asked by the British 1921 somerset maugham biography to make patriotic speeches to induce the US to aid Britain, if not necessarily become an allied combatant.

Gerald Haxton died in ; Maugham moved back to England first, then in to his villa in France, where he lived, interrupted by frequent and long travels, until his death. The gap left by Haxton's death in was filled by Alan Searle. Maugham had first met Searle in Searle was a young man from the London slum area of Bermondsey and he had already been kept by older men.

He proved a devoted if not a stimulating companion. Indeed one of Maugham's friends, describing the difference between Searle and Haxton, said simply: "Gerald was vintage, Alan was vin ordinaire. He once confessed: "I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed…. In order not to hurt their feelings, I have often acted a passion I did not feel.

In his last years Maugham adopted Searle as his son in order to ensure that he would inherit his estate, a move hotly contested by his daughter Liza and her husband, Lord Glendevon, and which exposed Maugham to much public ridicule. Achievements Commercial success with high book sales, successful play productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life.

Small and weak as a boy, Maugham had been proud even then of his stamina, and as an adult he kept churning out the books, proud that he could. Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality," his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work.

Maugham wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William FaulknerThomas MannJames Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. Maugham's homosexual leanings also shaped his fictionin two ways. Since, in life, he tended to see attractive women as sexual rivals, he often gave the women of his fiction sexual needs and appetites, in a way quite unusual for authors of his time.

Liza of Lambeth, Cakes and Ale and "The Razor's Edge" all featured women determined to service their strong sexual appetites, heedless of the result. Also, the fact that Maugham's own sexual appetites were highly disapproved of, or even criminal, in nearly all of the countries in which he traveled, made Maugham unusually tolerant of the vices of others.

Readers and critics often complained that Maugham did not clearly enough condemn what was bad in the villains of his fiction and plays. Maugham replied in "It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me. Maugham had begun collecting theatrical paintings before the First World War, continuing until his collection was second only to that of the Garrick Club [17].

In he announced that he would bequeath this collection to the Trustees of the National Theatre, and fromsome 14 years before his death, his paintings began their exhibition life. In they were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden [18] Significant Works Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, an autobiographical novel which deals with the life of the main character Philip Carey, who like Maugham, was orphaned and brought up by his pious uncle.

1921 somerset maugham biography

Philip's clubfoot causes him endless self-consciousness and embarrassment, echoing Maugham's struggles with his stutter. The popular and controversial novel launched Maugham's impressive writing career. One of the highest-paid writers of the early to mid-twentieth century, Maugham wrote fiction, memoir, travelogues, and plays. During World War I, Maugham assisted in the ambulance corps and in intelligence work.

He was stationed in Russia shortly before the Bolshevik revolution; later, he said that if he had only been sent there six months before, he might have succeeded in his aim of keeping the provisional government in power. During World War I, Maugham served in the medical corps and was later transferred to the intelligence service.

His experiences as a secret agent found vivid reflection in his collection of short stories, "Ashenden, or the British Agent" After the war, Maugham continued to travel extensively. He passed away on December 16,in Nice, France. Writing Career Maugham was a prolific writer, creating 25 plays, 21 novels, and over short stories.