Somerset Maugham: A Life Book

He was an instinctive and magnificent storyteller, with a talent also for success. Of Human Bondage was his masterpiece; The Razorâ??s Edge his most spectacular best-seller. He lived nearly ninety-two years, wrote seventy-eight books (forty million sold worldwide) and once had four plays running in London simultaneously. â??Rain,â? reflecting his fascination with the South Seas, is among the most widely read stories of our time. In World War I, he performed expertly and courageously as ambulance driver and as secret agent in Samoa and Russia. Eventually he knew â??everybodyâ?: Britainâ??s, Hollywoodâ??s and literatureâ??s royalty. He was seen as formidable, a cynic and the very emblem of worldliness. He wrote constantly about social and sexual entanglements but, in a closeted age, was increasingly secretive about his ownâ??loving men, wanting to love women. To the extraordinary life of Somerset Maugham and his development as a writer, Jeffrey Meyers brings all his gifts as biographer: of Hemingway (â??simply the best book there is on Hemingwayâ? â??J. F. Powers), of Orwell (â??moving and edifyingâ? â??Paul Theroux) and of D. H. Lawrence (â??probably the best biography of himâ? â??Times Literary Supplement).Telling Maughamâ??s story, from his sad, orphaned childhood in the small English coastal town of Whitstable, through his Paris years and his wandering years, to his luxurious, indeed glamorous, old age at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat, Meyers reveals much that is newâ??about Maughamâ??s days at Heidelberg and on Capri, his medical training, his wartime espionage, his quarrels with D. H. Lawrence and Edmund Wilson, his friendship with Noël Coward, and about his longtime lover, Gerald Haxton. He writes of Maughamâ??s encounters with Winston Churchill, E. M. Forster, the Sitwells, T. S. Eliot, Bernard Berenson and the Windsors; of his affairs with four attractive and accomplished women; of his torturous ten-year marriage to one of themâ??Syrie, who became a celebrated decoratorâ??and his wish to marry the actress Sue Jones, gentle, loving and promiscuous, who was his model for Rosie Driffield in Cakes and Ale. Meyers describes Joseph Conradâ??s influence on Maugham and Maughamâ??s on George Orwell and V. S. Naipaul. He provides a fascinating portrait of a brilliant and complex man whose talent has held and dazzled a cultivated audience from the late Victorian era to the twenty-first century.Read More