What to make of Maugham?

BIOGRAPHY: An outstanding study of a writer who, rich enough from his work to have a staff of 13, was described as 'the mahatma of middlebrow culture'

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham By Selina Hastings John Murray, 614pp. £25

HAS SOMERSET MAUGHAM'S popularity endured? Once among the world's most successful authors – 500,000 copies of The Razor's Edgewere sold in the United States within a month of the book's appearance, in 1944 – and though much of it is still in print, his fiction must today compete for sales with the likes of Dan Brown and a welter of chick-lit writers.

And although his plays could be guaranteed to fill any theatre a century ago, now they are scarcely ever resuscitated; a fine production of his 1926 comedy The Constant Wifeat Dublin's Gate Theatre three years ago showed Maugham to be a consummate stage craftsman – but his themes irrevocably dated.

As Selina Hastings reminds readers in her new biography, although he only died in 1965, Maugham was born in 1874, the year Disraeli succeeded Gladstone as British prime minister. No wonder towards the end of his life he referred to himself as “a seedy relic of the Edwardian era”.

Permeated with cynicism from a blighted childhood onwards, Maugham had few illusions about himself or his work. In his 1938 memoir, The Summing Up, he acknowledged: "I am a made writer. I do not write as I want to; I write as I can . . . I have had small power of imagination . . . no lyrical quality . . . little gift of metaphor I had an acute power of observation, and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed."

His creative powers were limited, and for his plots he relied heavily on people he met and stories he was told. On the other hand, his powers of narration, of drawing us into a yarn and retaining our attention, are exemplary.

He can only engage with the material world, however; matters metaphysical or spiritual are beyond his capabilities, as the clumsy efforts to explain Larry Darrell's discovery of religious enlightenment in The Razor's Edgedemonstrate. A far more compelling and acutely drawn character in that book is the worldly socialite Elliott Templeton.

As a prose stylist, Maugham had few equals among his contemporaries. He took enormous trouble over his work and, even at the height of his fame, prior to publication submitted what he had written to the scrutiny of Edward Marsh, who was renowned for meticulousness in matters of grammar. And yet he has never won approval from the upper echelons of literature: in 1978 the New York Review of Booksdismissed him as "the mahatma of middlebrow culture", and even his friend Glenway Wescott considered Maugham "beloved by unliterary, unofficial, unacademic humanity".

AT THE SAMEtime, his considerable merits have not gone entirely unappreciated. Not long after his death, LP Hartley considered that, within its limits, "Mr Maugham's work is nearly perfect". Some 30 years earlier

Desmond MacCarthy wrote that Maugham “has a sense of what is widely interesting, because like Maupassant, he is as much a man of the world as he is an artist”, adding that “at his best he can tell a story as well as any man alive or dead”. And Raymond Chandler, himself a masterly narrator, rightly observed of Maugham: “His plots are cool and deadly, and his timing is absolutely flawless.”

Detached self-appraisal meant Maugham was rarely troubled by the opinions of other writers, most of whom were far less successful than he. His career exemplifies the concept of laughing all the way to the bank, as he earned an enviable amount of money from his work; one short story alone, Rain, made him more than $1 million in royalties. At Villa Mauresque, his luxurious home in the south of France, he was attended by a staff of 13, including a butler, two footmen and six gardeners. It's unlikely any of the present generation's popular authors is so well cosseted.

But, coming from a relatively modest background, and not marked out for great achievement, he had worked long and hard to realise his ambitions.

Hastings quotes a character from George Gissing's New Grub Street, remarking: "Your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets."

This was Maugham’s approach, especially in the years when he was struggling to make a name for himself. Before becoming a playwright, which he did primarily because it was then a faster route to large sums of money than fiction, he went to the theatre constantly and paid attention to what was well received by audiences. Then he produced his own version of this.

Furthermore, from the start he was highly disciplined; even in old age he diligently wrote every morning, and nothing was ever allowed to disrupt his daily routine. When Dorothy Parker came to stay with him for three weeks, she expected to join an amusing house party but found herself alone with a host who spent most of the day in his study. “That old lady,” she remarked afterwards, “is a crashing bore.”

It was an unfair judgment, and one not borne out by other visitors, who found Maugham fascinating if somewhat inscrutable: meeting him in Los Angeles during the second World War, Christopher Isherwood compared Maugham, then aged 67, to “an old Gladstone bag covered with labels. God knows what is inside”.

INHERENT SHYNESS COUPLED WITHa serious stammer made Maugham reluctant to reveal himself in company, and much the best material for his books and plays was gleaned via a gregarious companion of some 30 years, Gerald Haxton. Furthermore, it is fair to assess that Maugham held himself in check because he wanted to marshal resources for his work.

Among the reasons for the failure of his ill-matched marriage was the excessive sociability of Syrie Maugham (deliciously satirised as the unscrupulous interior decorator Mrs Beaver in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust) and her inability to appreciate that he needed to spend more time alone than in company.

Selina Hastings has written an outstanding biography of a man who, at the age of 81, insisted that “a life of myself is bound to be dull”. On the contrary, in Hastings’s hands, Maugham’s story is anything but.

Replete with insights and asides, perceptive synopses and analyses of the work and, for those who want it, an abundance of salacious scurrility, this is a tale that would have held Maugham’s attention from start to finish.

Robert O'Byrne is a writer and journalist. His most recent book,Style City: How London Became a Fashion Capital , is published by Frances Lincoln