Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham CH (/mɔːm/ MAWM; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s.[1]

Somerset Maugham

CH
Maugham photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1934
Born
William Somerset Maugham

(1874-01-25)25 January 1874
Paris, France
Died16 December 1965(1965-12-16) (aged 91)
Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France
EducationThe King's School, Canterbury
Alma mater
OccupationPlaywright, novelist, short story writer
Spouse(s)
​
​
(m. 1917; div. 1929)​
ChildrenMary Elizabeth Maugham

Both Maugham's parents died before he was 10, and the orphaned boy was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. He did not want to become a lawyer like other men in his family, so he trained and qualified as a physician. His first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time.

During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service. He worked for the service in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire. During and after the war, he travelled in India, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. He drew from those experiences in his later short stories and novels.

Childhood and education

Maugham was the fourth of six sons born in his family. Their father, Robert Ormond Maugham, was a lawyer who handled the legal affairs of the British Embassy in Paris.[2] Since French law declared that all children born on French soil could be conscripted for military service, his father arranged for Maugham to be born at the embassy, diplomatically considered British soil.[3] His grandfather, another Robert, was a prominent lawyer and co-founder of the Law Society of England and Wales.[4] Maugham refers to this grandfather's writings in Chapter 6 of his literary memoir, The Summing Up:

"...in the catalogue of the Library at the British Museum there is a long list of his legal works. He wrote only one book that was not of this character. It was a collection of essays that he had contributed to the solid magazines of the day and he issued it, as became his sense of decorum, anonymously. I once had the book in my hands, a handsome volume bound in calf, but I never read it and I have not been able to get hold of a copy since. I wish I had, for I might have learnt from it something of the kind of man he was."[5]

His family assumed Maugham and his brothers would be lawyers. His elder brother, Viscount Maugham, did become a lawyer, enjoying a distinguished legal career and serving as Lord Chancellor from 1938 to 1939.

Maugham's mother, Edith Mary (née Snell), contracted tuberculosis, a condition for which her physician prescribed childbirth.[6] She had Maugham several years after the last of his three elder brothers was born. By the time Maugham was three, his older brothers were all away at boarding school.

Edith's sixth and final son died on 25 January 1882, one day after his birth. It was Maugham's eighth birthday. Edith died of tuberculosis six days later on 31 January at the age of 41.[7] The early death of his mother left Maugham traumatized. He kept his mother's photograph at his bedside for the rest of his life.[8] Two years after Edith's death, Maugham's father died in France of cancer.

Maugham was sent back to the UK to be cared for by his paternal uncle, Henry MacDonald Maugham, the Vicar of Whitstable, in Kent. The move was emotionally damaging, as Henry Maugham was cold and emotionally cruel. The boy attended The King's School, Canterbury, which was also difficult for him. He was teased for his bad English (French had been his first language) and his short stature, which he inherited from his father. Maugham developed a stammer that stayed with him all his life. It was sporadic, being subject to his moods and circumstances.[9] Miserable both at his uncle's vicarage and at school, the young Maugham developed a talent for making wounding remarks to those who displeased him. This ability is sometimes reflected in Maugham's literary characters.

At age 16, Maugham refused to continue at The King's School. His uncle allowed him to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. During his year in Heidelberg, Maugham met and had a sexual affair with John Ellingham Brooks, an Englishman ten years his senior.[10] He also wrote his first book there, a biography of Giacomo Meyerbeer, an opera composer.[11]

After Maugham's return to Britain, his uncle found him a position in an accountant's office. After a month Maugham gave it up and returned to Whitstable. His uncle tried to find Maugham a new profession. Maugham's father and three older brothers were distinguished lawyers, but Maugham was not interested in this profession. He rejected a career in the Church because of his stutter. His uncle rejected the Civil Service, believing that it was no longer a career for gentlemen after a new law requiring applicants to pass an entrance examination. The local physician suggested the medical profession and Maugham's uncle agreed.

Maugham had been writing steadily since he was 15, and wanted to be an author, but he did not tell his guardian. For the next five years, he studied medicine at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in Lambeth.

Career

Early works
W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham was living in London, meeting people of a "low" sort whom he would never have met otherwise, and seeing them at a time of heightened anxiety and meaning in their lives. In maturity, he recalled the value of his experience as a medical student: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief ..."[12]

Maugham kept his own lodgings, took pleasure in furnishing them, filled many notebooks with literary ideas, and continued writing nightly while at the same time studying for his medical degree. In 1897, he published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, a tale of working-class adultery and its consequences. It drew its details from Maugham's experiences as a medical student doing midwifery work in Lambeth, a South London slum. Maugham wrote near the opening of the novel: "... it is impossible always to give the exact unexpurgated words of Liza and the other personages of the story; the reader is therefore entreated with his thoughts to piece out the necessary imperfections of the dialogue."[13]

Liza of Lambeth's first print run sold out in a matter of weeks. Maugham, who had qualified as a medic, dropped medicine and embarked on his 65-year career as a man of letters. He later said, "I took to it as a duck takes to water."[14]

The writer's life allowed Maugham to travel and to live in places such as Spain and Capri for the next decade, but his next ten works never came close to rivalling the success of Liza. This changed in 1907 with the success of his play Lady Frederick. By the next year, he had four plays running simultaneously in London, and Punch published a cartoon of Shakespeare biting his fingernails nervously as he looked at the billboards.

Maugham's supernatural thriller, The Magician (1908), based its principal character on the well-known and somewhat disreputable Aleister Crowley. Crowley took some offence at the treatment of the protagonist, Oliver Haddo. He wrote a critique of the novel, charging Maugham with plagiarism, in a review published in Vanity Fair.[15] Maugham survived the criticism without much damage to his reputation.

By 1914, Maugham was famous, with 10 plays produced and 10 novels published. Too old to enlist when the First World War broke out, he served in France as a member of the British Red Cross's so-called "Literary Ambulance Drivers", a group of some 24 well-known writers, including the Americans John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and Ernest Hemingway.

Maugham early in his career

During this time he met Frederick Gerald Haxton, a young San Franciscan, who became his companion and lover until Haxton's death in 1944.[16] Throughout this period, Maugham continued to write. He proofread Of Human Bondage at a location near Dunkirk during a lull in his ambulance duties.[17]

Of Human Bondage (1915) initially was criticized in both England and the United States; the New York World described the romantic obsession of the protagonist Philip Carey as "the sentimental servitude of a poor fool". The influential American novelist and critic Theodore Dreiser rescued the novel, referring to it as a work of genius and comparing it to a Beethoven symphony. His review gave the book a lift, and it has never been out of print since.[18]

Maugham indicates in his foreword that he derived the title from a passage in Baruch Spinoza's Ethics:

"The impotence of man to govern or restrain the emotions I call bondage, for a man who is under their control is not his own master ... so that he is often forced to follow the worse, although he see the better before him."[19]

Of Human Bondage is considered to have many autobiographical elements. Maugham gave Philip Carey a club foot (rather than his stammer); the vicar of Blackstable appears derived from the vicar of Whitstable; and Carey is a medic. Maugham insisted the book was more invention than fact. The close relationship between fictional and non-fictional became Maugham's trademark. He wrote in 1938: "Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other."[12]

Marriage and family

Maugham entered into a relationship with Syrie Wellcome, the wife of Henry Wellcome, an American-born English pharmaceutical magnate. They had a daughter named Mary Elizabeth (1915–1998).[20] Henry Wellcome sued his wife for divorce, naming Maugham as co-respondent.[21]

In May 1917, following the decree absolute, Syrie Wellcome and Maugham were married. Syrie Maugham became a noted interior decorator who in the 1920s popularized "the all-white room". They changed their daughter's surname, originally registered as Wellcome and reflecting Syrie's marriage. She was familiarly called Liza and her surname was changed to Maugham.

The marriage was unhappy, and the couple separated. Maugham later lived in the French Riviera with his partner Gerald Haxton until Haxton's death in 1944. He next lived with Alan Searle until his own death in 1965.[6]

Sexuality

Maugham has been described both as bisexual[22][23][24] and as homosexual.[25] In addition to his 13-year marriage to Syrie Wellcome, he had affairs with other women in his youth.[26]

In later life Maugham was exclusively homosexual, and lived successively with two men.[27] Frequently quoted in this connection is Maugham's statement to 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 around.

— W. Somerset Maugham, (Maugham, Robin 1970), quoted in Hastings 2010, p. 39

Religious views

Maugham said that he remained agnostic to the questions concerning the existence of God.[28][29] He considered that the misery and bitterness of the world suggested that God did not exist.[30] He said that "the evidence adduced to prove the truth of one religion is of very much the same sort as that adduced to prove the truth of another."[31]

Maugham did not believe in God or an afterlife. He considered notions of future punishment or reward to be outrageous.[32]

Intelligence work

Maugham returned to Britain from his ambulance unit duties in order to promote Of Human Bondage. With that completed, he was eager to assist the war effort again. As he was unable to return to his ambulance unit, Syrie arranged for him to be introduced to a high-ranking intelligence officer known as "R"; he was recruited by John Wallinger.[33] In September 1915, Maugham began work in Switzerland, as one of the network of British agents who operated against the Berlin Committee, whose members included Virendranath Chattopadhyay, an Indian revolutionary trying to resist colonial Britain's rule of India. Maugham lived in Switzerland as a writer.

In June 1917, Maugham was asked by Sir William Wiseman, an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service (later named MI6), to undertake a special mission in Russia.[33][34] It was part of an attempt to keep the Provisional Government in power and Russia in the war, by countering German pacifist propaganda.[35] Two and a half months later, the Bolsheviks took control. Maugham subsequently said that if he had been able to get there six months earlier, he might have succeeded. Quiet and observant, Maugham had a good temperament for intelligence work; he believed he had inherited from his lawyer father a gift for cool judgment and the ability to avoid being deceived by facile appearances.[33][36]

Maugham used his spying experiences as the basis for Ashenden: Or the British Agent, a collection of short stories about a gentlemanly, sophisticated, aloof spy. This character is considered to have influenced Ian Fleming's later series of James Bond novels.[37] In 1922, Maugham dedicated his book On A Chinese Screen to Syrie. This was a collection of 58 ultra-short story sketches, which he had written during his 1920 travels through China and Hong Kong, intending to expand the sketches later as a book.[38]

Travels and writing

In 1916, Maugham travelled to the Pacific to research his novel The Moon and Sixpence, based on the life of Paul Gauguin. This was the first of his journeys through the late-Imperial world of the 1920s and 1930s that inspired his novels. He became known as a writer who portrayed the last days of European colonialism in India, Southeast Asia, China and the Pacific, although the books on which this reputation rests represent only a fraction of his output. On this and all subsequent journeys, he was accompanied by Haxton, whom he regarded as indispensable to his success as a writer. Maugham was painfully shy, and Haxton the extrovert gathered human material which the author drew from for his fiction. In 1938, he visited the Hindu sage Ramana Maharishi at his ashram in India, after whom he modeled the spiritual guru of his 1944 novel The Razor's Edge.[39][40]

Maugham's play The Letter, starring Gladys Cooper, had its premiere in London in 1927. Later, he asked that Katharine Cornell play the lead in the 1927 Broadway version. He had adapted it for the stage from a story published in 1924 in Hearst's International; it was reprinted in his collection The Casuarina Tree (1926).

The play was adapted as a film by the same name in 1929. Jeanne Eagels had the lead. A second film adaptation was released in 1940, starring American actress Bette Davis, who was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress for her performance. In 1951, Katherine Cornell was a great success playing the lead in Maugham's comedy The Constant Wife.[41]

In 1926, Maugham bought the Villa La Mauresque, on 9 acres (3.6 hectares) at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera. It was his home for most of the rest of his life. There he hosted one of the great literary and social salons of the 1920s and 30s. He continued to be highly productive, writing plays, short stories, novels, essays and travel books. By 1940, when the collapse of France and its occupation by the German Third Reich forced Maugham to leave the French Riviera, he was a refugee—but one of the wealthiest and most famous writers in the English-speaking world.

Maugham's short fable "An Appointment in Samarra" (1933) is based on an ancient Babylonian myth: Death is both the narrator and a central character.[42][43] The American writer John O'Hara credited Maugham's tale as the inspiration for the title of his novel Appointment in Samarra.

Grand old man of letters

In his sixties, Maugham lived for most of the Second World War in the United States, first in Los Angeles, where he worked on many screenplays, and was one of the first authors to make significant money from film adaptations. He later lived in the South. While in the US before that country's entry into the war, he was asked by the British government to make patriotic speeches to induce the US to aid Britain, if not necessarily become an allied combatant. After his companion Gerald Haxton died in 1944, Maugham returned to England. In private, Maugham espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish refugees, noting that "the Gestapo is known to have had spies among refugees, and these have not seldom been Jews".[44] After the war, in 1946 Maugham returned to his villa in France. He lived there until his death, with time away for frequent and long travels.

In that period, Maugham began a relationship with Alan Searle, whom he had first met in 1928. A younger man from the London slum area of Bermondsey, Searle had previously embarked upon an affair with the writer Lytton Strachey. He proved a devoted (if not a stimulating) companion. He was a jocular character, always engaging but could be mischievous. One of Maugham's friends, describing the difference between Haxton and Searle, said simply: "Gerald was vintage, Alan was vin ordinaire."[45]

Maugham's love life was almost never smooth. 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."[12]

In 1962 Maugham sold a collection of paintings, some of which had already been assigned by deed to his daughter Liza. She sued her father and won a judgment of £230,000. Maugham publicly disowned her; by that time his mental health had deteriorated and been brought into question by his family. In order to break all ties he claimed Liza was not his biological daughter and he adopted Searle as his son and heir, but the adoption was annulled. In his 1962 volume of memoirs, Looking Back, he attacked the late Syrie Maugham and wrote that Liza had been born before they married. The memoir cost him several friends and exposed him to much public ridicule. Liza and her husband Lord Glendevon contested the change in Maugham's will in the French courts, and it was overturned.

But after Maugham's death, in 1965 Searle inherited £50,000, the contents of the Villa La Mauresque, Maugham's manuscripts, and his revenue from copyrights for 30 years. Thereafter the copyrights passed to the Royal Literary Fund.

There is no grave for Maugham. His ashes were scattered near the Maugham Library, The King's School, Canterbury.[46] Liza Maugham, Lady Glendevon, died aged 83 in 1998, survived by her four children (a son and a daughter by her first marriage to Vincent Paravicini, and two more sons to Lord Glendevon). Among her grandchildren is Derek Paravicini, who is a musical prodigy and autistic savant.[47][48]

Achievements

Commercial success with high book sales, successful theatre 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 attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality", his small vocabulary, and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work. In 1934 the American journalist and radio personality Alexander Woollcott offered Maugham some language advice: "The female implies, and from that the male infers." Maugham responded: "I am not yet too old to learn."[49]

Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticised as "such a tissue of clichés that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way".[50]

For a public man of Maugham's generation, being openly gay was impossible. Whether his own orientation disgusted him (as it did many at a time when homosexuality was widely considered a moral failing as well as illegal) or whether he was trying to disguise his leanings, Maugham wrote disparagingly of the gay artist. In Don Fernando, a non-fiction book about his years living in Spain, Maugham pondered a (perhaps fanciful) suggestion that the painter El Greco was homosexual:

It cannot be denied that the homosexual has a narrower outlook on the world than the normal man. In certain respects the natural responses of the species are denied to him. Some at least of the broad and typical human emotions he can never experience. However subtly he sees life he cannot see it whole...I cannot now help asking myself whether what I see in El Greco's work of tortured fantasy and sinister strangeness is not due to such a sexual abnormality as this.[51]

Maugham's public view of his abilities remained modest. Towards the end of his career he described himself as "in the very first row of the second-raters".[52] In 1948 he wrote "Great Novelists and Their Novels" [also known as "Ten Novels and Their Authors" and "The Art of Fiction"], in which he listed the ten best novels of world literature in his view.[53]

Maugham was appointed a Companion of Honour in the 1954 Birthday Honours.

Maugham had begun collecting theatrical paintings before the First World War; he continued to the point where his collection was second only to that of the Garrick Club.[54] In 1948 he announced that he would bequeath this collection to the Trustees of the National Theatre. From 1951, some 14 years before his death, his paintings began their exhibition life. In 1994 they were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden.[55][56]

Significant works

Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, a semi-autobiographical novel that deals with the life of the main character Philip Carey, who, like Maugham, was orphaned, and brought up by his pious uncle. Philip's clubfoot causes him endless self-consciousness and embarrassment, echoing Maugham's struggles with his stutter and, as his biographer Ted Morgan notes, his homosexuality.[57]

Two of his later novels were based on historical people: The Moon and Sixpence is about the life of Paul Gauguin; and Cakes and Ale contains what were taken as thinly veiled and unflattering characterisations of the authors Thomas Hardy (who had died two years previously) and Hugh Walpole. Maugham himself denied any intention of doing this in a long letter to Walpole:[58] "I certainly never intended Alroy Kear to be a portrait of you. He is made up of a dozen people and the greater part of him is myself"—yet in an introduction written for the 1950 Modern Library edition of the work, he plainly states that Walpole was the inspiration for Kear (while denying that Thomas Hardy was the inspiration for the novelist Driffield). Maugham's last major novel, The Razor's Edge (1944), was a departure for him in many ways. While much of the novel takes place in Europe, its main characters are American, not British. The protagonist is a disillusioned veteran of the First World War who abandons his wealthy friends and lifestyle, travelling to India seeking enlightenment. The story's themes of Eastern mysticism and war-weariness struck a chord with readers during the Second World War. It was adapted into a major motion picture, released in 1946, starring Tyrone Power as Larry Darrell, with Herbert Marshall as W. Somerset Maugham. Another film adaptation was issued in 1984, starring Bill Murray.

Among his short stories, some of the most memorable are those dealing with the lives of Western, mostly British, colonists in the Pacific Islands and Asia. They typically express the emotional toll the colonists bear by their isolation. "Rain", "Footprints in the Jungle", and "The Outstation" are considered especially notable. "Rain", in particular, which charts the moral disintegration of a missionary attempting to convert prostitute Sadie Thompson, has kept its reputation. It has been adapted as a play and as several films. His The Magician (1908) is based on British occultist Aleister Crowley.[59]

Maugham was one of the most significant travel writers of the inter-war years, and can be compared with contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh and Freya Stark. His best efforts in this line include The Gentleman in the Parlour, dealing with a journey through Burma, Siam, Cambodia and Vietnam, and On a Chinese Screen, a series of very brief vignettes that might have been sketches for stories left unwritten.

Influence

In 1947 Maugham instituted the Somerset Maugham Award,[60] awarded to the best British writer or writers under the age of thirty-five for a work of fiction published in the past year. Notable winners include V. S. Naipaul, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis and Thom Gunn. On his death, Maugham donated his royalties to the Royal Literary Fund.[60]

Other writers acknowledged his work. Anthony Burgess praised his influence. Ian Fleming noted that he wrote the short story "Quantum of Solace" as an homage to Maugham's writing style.[61] George Orwell said that Maugham was "the modern writer who has influenced me the most, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills".[62] In his novel Misery, Stephen King places a rich collection of Maugham's books in the house where most of the plot is set, and incidentally praises Maugham's mastery of storytelling.

Portraits
Maugham was the subject of this caricature by David Low.

Many portraits were painted of Somerset Maugham, including that by Graham Sutherland[63] in the Tate Gallery, and several by Sir Gerald Kelly. Sutherland's portrait was included in the exhibition Painting the Century: 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900–2000 at the National Portrait Gallery.

Bibliography
Main article: List of works by W. Somerset Maugham

Film adaptations

See also

References
  1. "W. Somerset Maugham", The Literature Network
  2. Maugham, Somerset 1962.
  3. Morgan, 1980, p. 4.
  4. Maugham, Robin 1977.
  5. Outlines (1823). Outlines of character, the great character, the English character [&c.] by a member of the Philomathic institution.
  6. Hastings 2010.
  7. Meyers, 2004, p. 11.
  8. Morgan, 1980, pp. 8–9.
  9. Morgan, 1980, p. 17.
  10. Morgan, 1980, p. 24.
  11. Epstein, 1991, p. 189.
  12. Maugham, Somerset (1938). The Summing Up. London: William Heinemann.
  13. Maugham, Liza of Lambeth (Rockville, MD: Serenity Publishers, 2008), p. 10.
  14. Maugham, The Partial View (Heineman 1954), p. 8.
  15. Crowley's Vanity Fair review is reprinted in Anthony Curtis and John Whitehead, eds., W. Somerset Maugham The Critical Heritage (Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1987), pp. 44–56.
  16. Haxton appears as Tony Paxton in Maugham's 1917 play, Our Betters.
  17. Morgan, 1980, p. 188.
  18. Morgan, 1980, pp. 197–8.
  19. Ruth Franklin, "The Great and the Good," The New Yorker, 31 May 2010, retrieved 6 September 2012
  20. (Her birth name is recorded as Mary Elizabeth Wellcome in the immigration and naturalization files of Ellis Island, along with her mother, who is listed as Syrie Wellcome, on the 21 July 1916 manifest of HMS Baltic.)
  21. Bailey, Penny. "Syrie and Mounteney Wellcome". Wellcome Trust. Retrieved 11 November 2013.
  22. Hastings 2010, p. 39.
  23. Meyers 2010, p. 86.
  24. Klein 2014, p. 142.
  25. Calder, Robert (1992). introduction. Of Human Bondage. By Maugham, W. Somerset. Penguin. p. x. ISBN 9780140185225. Francis King argues that Philip's clubfoot was ‘a metaphor for a graver disability than the stammer that most critics have assumed it to have been’: that is, his homosexuality
  26. Klein 2014, p. 142 " By the time he fell in love with an actress (identified only by the first name of Nan) he was financially independent. … He was in love with her for eight years."
  27. Tamagne, Florence (2004). A History of Homosexuality in Europe. 1. Algora Publishing. p. 229. ISBN 9780875861999. From 1920 on, Maugham was exclusively homosexual
  28. “I remain an agnostic, and the practical outcome of agnosticism is that you act as though God did not exist,” Maugham wrote in his memoir The Summing Up (1938).
  29. "In The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer's Notebook (1949) Maugham explains his philosophy of life as a resigned atheism and a certain skepticism about the extent of man's innate goodness and intelligence; it is this that gives his work its astringent cynicism." 'Maugham, W. Somerset', Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed 16 August 2017.
  30. “I'm glad I don't believe in God. When I look at the misery of the world and its bitterness I think that no belief can be more ignoble.” – A Writer's Notebook, 1949
  31. “The evidence adduced to prove the truth of one religion is of very much the same sort as that adduced to prove the truth of another. I wonder if that does not make the Christian uneasy to reflect that if he had been in Morocco he would have been a Mahometan, if in Ceylon a Buddhist; and in that case Christianity would have seemed to him as absurd and obviously untrue as those religions seem to the Christian.” D. 1965
  32. “I do not believe in God. I see no need of such idea. It is incredible to me that there should be an after-life. I find the notion of future punishment outrageous and of future reward extravagant. I am convinced that when I die, I shall cease entirely to live; I shall return to the earth I came from.” — W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook (1949).
  33. Popplewell 1995, p. 230.
  34. Morgan, 1980, p. 227.
  35. Morgan, 1980, p. 226.
  36. Woods 2007, p. 55.
  37. Morgan, 1980, p. 206.
  38. Morgan, 1980, pp. 245, 264.
  39. Zaleski, Philip; Carol Zaleski (2006). Prayer: A History. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 0-618-77360-6.
  40. "Eastern promise". Mint. 17 May 2008.
  41. Tad Mosel, Leading Lady: The World and Theatre of Katharine Cornell, Little, Brown & Co., Boston (1978)
  42. K-State.edu Baker, "Maugham's version of An Appointment in Samarra", Kansas State University
  43. An older version of An Appointment in Samarra is recorded in the Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 53a.
  44. Kushner, Tony. The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society during the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989, p. 117
  45. Morgan, 1980, p. 495.
  46. Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 30808). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
  47. "Camilla's nephew, the tortured musical genius". Evening Standard. 7 April 2007. Retrieved 6 April 2016.
  48. "In the key of genius". Daily Telegraph. 17 September 2006. Retrieved 6 April 2016.
  49. Hoyt, Edwin P. (1968). Alexander Woollcott: The Man Who Came to Dinner. New York: Abelard-Schuman. p. 258.
  50. Edmund Wilson, quoted in Gore Vidal, 1990, p. 10.
  51. Don Fernando 1935, revised 1950, p. 141 of Mandarin edition of 1990.
  52. Anne Skillion, ed., The New York Public Library Literature Companion (NY: Free Press, 2001), 159
  53. David Wilson Taylor. "Somerset Maugham'S Ten Best Novels Of The World". Home.comcast.net. Archived from the original on 27 February 2004. Retrieved 5 August 2014.
  54. Mander & Mitchenson, 1980.
  55. National Theatre.
  56. National Theatre.
  57. Ted Morgan. Maugham: A Biography. Simon and Schuster, 1984. ISBN 978-0671505813
  58. Hart-Davis, Rupert (1985). Hugh Walpole. Hamish Hamilton. pp. 316–317. ISBN 0-241-11406-3.
  59. Morgan, Ted. Somerset Maugham. London: Jonathan Cape. p. 118. ISBN 0224018132.
  60. Meyers, Jeffrey (2004). Somerset Maugham: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
  61. Chancellor 2005, p. 148.
  62. Orwell, George (1968). My Country Right or Left: 1940–43. London: Secker & Warburg.
  63. Sutherland, Graham, Somerset MAUGHAM Archived 14 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine 1949. Oil on canvas, Tate Gallery.

Sources
  • Hastings, Selina, 2009; The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham – A biography. London, John Murray. ISBN 978-0-7195-6554-0
  • Hastings, Selina, 2009 "A blackstable boyhood"
  • Hastings, Selina (2010). The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham.
  • Klein, Fritz (2014). The Bisexual Option. Routledge. ISBN 9781317713210.
  • Mander, Raymond & Mitchenson, Joe, 1955; The Artist and the Theatre. William Heinemann Ltd
  • Mander, Raymond & Mitchenson, Joe, 1980; Guide to the Maugham Collection of Theatrical Paintings. Heinemann & the National Theatre
  • Maugham, Robin (1970). Escape from the Shadows. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
  • Maugham, Robin, 1977; Somerset and all the Maughams. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-8371-8236-0
  • Maugham, Robin, 1977; Search for Nirvana. W. H. Allen.
  • Maugham, W. Somerset, 1938; The Summing Up. Garden City Publishing Company.
  • Maugham, W. Somerset, 1962; Looking Back. As serialised in Show, June, July & August.
  • Meyers, Jeffrey, 2004; Somerset Maugham: A life. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-375-41475-6
  • Milton, Giles Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Global Plot, Sceptre, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4447-3702-8
  • Morgan, Ted, 1980; Somerset Maugham Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-01813-2
  • Morgan, Ted, 1984; Maugham Touchstone Books. ISBN 0-671-50581-5.
  • Nichols, Beverley 1966, A Case of Human Bondage
  • Rogal, Samuel J., 1997; A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29916-1.
  • Vidal, Gore, 1 February 1990; The New York Review of Books.
  • Popplewell, Richard J. (1995), Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924, Routledge, ISBN 0-7146-4580-X
  • Woods, B.F. (2007), Neutral Ground: A Political History of Espionage Fiction, Algora Publishing, ISBN 978-0-87586-535-5
  • Epstein, Joseph (1991), Partial Payments, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 978-0-393-30716-0
  • Venkataramiah, Munagala, 15 October 1938, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi.
  • Munagala, Venkataramiah (1938), Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Ramanashramam, Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, India, ISBN 81-88018-07-4, archived from the original on 28 August 2013

Further reading

Editions
  • Burgess, Anthony (ed.) Maugham's Malaysian Stories (Hong Kong: Heinemann, 1969) [no ISBN]. Selected and introduced by Anthony Burgess. Includes The Vessel of Wrath, The Force of Circumstance, The Door of Opportunity, The Four Dutchmen, P. & O., and A Casual Affair. Out of print.
  • Maugham, W. Somerset Collected Stories (London: Everyman's Library, 2004) ISBN 9781857152760.
Library resources about
Somerset Maugham

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.