W. Somerset Maugham

By Ivor Brown

Somerset Maugham 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.

In 1947 Maugham instituted the Somerset Maugham Award, 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 copyrights to the Royal Literary Fund.

Other writers acknowledged his work. Anthony Burgess, who included a complex fictional portrait of Maugham in the novel Earthly Powers, praised his influence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781448209941

Ivor Brown

Ivor John Carnegie Brown (1891-1974) was a British journalist and man of letters. Born in Penang, Malaya, Brown was the son of Dr. William Carnegie Brown, a specialist in tropical diseases, and his wife Jean Carnegie. At an early age he was sent to Britain, where he attended Suffolk Hall preparatory school and Cheltenham College. After additional private instruction, he was accepted into Balliol College, Oxford, graduating with double degrees in Classics and Literae Humaniores. Brown spent his final years concentrating on writing books. He would eventually publish over 75 books covering a wide range of topics and genres, but he was best known for his works on literature and the English language. He was chairman of the British Drama League from 1954 to 1962 and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and he was named a CBE in 1957. He died in London in 1974.

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I. The Life

Both the grandfather and the father of William Somerset Maugham were eminent lawyers. The family tradition was enhanced when his brother became Lord Chancellor. The grandfather founded the Incorporated Law Society and wrote many legal books. The father became solicitor to the British Embassy in Paris. There he met and married the daughter of an English army officer whose widow, having squandered a legacy, was eking out her pension by writing novels in French and composing light music. She was known for her beauty and this her daughter, Maugham’s mother, inherited. Though she was consumptive she had six sons. William related that the doctors of the period thought that pregnancies were good for tuberculous patients. Their curious belief was not justified in her case. She died at thirty-eight. William, who had been born on 25 January 1874, was then only eight. His father died two years later.

As a small boy William had been to a French school and then had an English tutor, a clergyman attached to the Embassy. He thus learned both languages in childhood: French at first was the more familiar. He remembered being told that when he was in a railway-train with his mother and looking out of the window he cried, ‘Regardez, Maman, voilà un ‘orse’. The orphan was put in the care of his uncle and guardian, a clergyman at Whitstable which appears as Blackstable in the novels, on the north coast of Kent, not far from Canterbury which is disguised as Tercanbury. How far is the lonely, crippled and bewildered boy represented by Philip Carey in Maugham’s long novel Of Human Bondage published in 1915? Of this book he wrote that it was autobiographical but not an autobiography. ‘Fact and fiction are inextricably mixed; the emotions are my own, but not all the incidents related as they happened.’

Since the feelings, if not the events, are stated to be authentic, the years in the cold, bleak parsonage with his austere, forbidding and self-absorbed uncle and his timid aunt, a dear creature, kindly at heart but terrified of contravening her husband’s grim notions of a Christian life, must have been unhappy. The early chapters of Philip’s chronicle do not give quite as repulsive a picture of Victorian clericalism and un-Christian Christianity as are to be found in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, but the atmosphere at Blackstable, like the house itself, is bitterly cold, deterrent, and depressing. The dominant faith with its precept that all suffering must be endured as the divine will, that every event in the Bible records an actual occurrence and that everything said about sin and damnation is the word of God, seems as chilling as an east wind in that exposed corner of south-eastern England on a February day. One shivers while one reads as Philip shivered in his icy bedroom. There is also a shiversome occasion when, having accepted his uncle’s assurance that prayer can achieve anything he believes, he prays fervently to be cured of his limp and is left as lame as before. Yet, when Maugham published A Writer’s Notebook in 1949, he quoted some sayings of his uncle jotted down in 1892. ‘A parson is paid to preach, not practise.’ ‘Do unto others as you would they should do unto you. An excellent maxim—for others.’ Evidently the Rev. Carey had a cynical sense of humour which is not presented in the story.

Philip’s experiences when he was sent to the preparatory and then the senior department of the King’s School at Tercanbury must be close to those of Maugham’s years at the King’s School of Canterbury. Philip is handicapped by a club foot, unable to play in the school’s games, and at first victimized by sneers and bullying. The author was not thus physically handicapped, but he was afflicted by a stutter with its destructive effect on self-confidence. This unfortunate stammer he had to combat in later life. The masters are mostly depicted as disappointed, ill-tempered and incompetent men, but Mr Perkins, the new Head, appears as a genuinely able scholar of humble origin. Given command in a world of snobs, he faces it bravely. He is imaginative and sympathetic. If drawn from life, he suggests at least one considerable relief at a time of boyish unhappiness and frustration. Philip has intellectual ability and is quick at his lessons. Also, as he grows up, he develops a will of his own. To the consternation both of his uncle and Mr Perkins he refuses to go to Oxford with a clergyman’s career in view and decides instead to learn languages in Europe and goes to Heidelberg University.

One year in Germany was a liberation. The boy was glad to be a man of the world. The boarding-house in which he lived was crowded and conventional, but Philip met amusing incidents and made friendships. He went to the theatre and discovered with delight the New Drama of Ibsen and the Ibsenites. Also he decided that he could never be a clergyman. Maugham chose medicine on his return from his year at Heidelberg and entered St Thomas’s Hospital in 1892 as a student. He qualified as a doctor after five years. Before he had finished his training he had written a novel, Liza of Lambeth, based on his experience of proletarian poverty, gaiety and tragedy in the mean streets of South London. It caused, he said, ‘a mild sensation’. Such realism with such a background was then unexpected.

The sales of Liza of Lambeth were satisfactory to a beginner but not largely rewarding. But at least a small name had been made. Fortunately Maugham had come into a little money and thus could afford a year in Spain and relished it. His constant enjoyment of travel was assisted by his exceptional command of languages. As a young man he spoke and read widely in German, Italian, and Spanish as well as in the French which had come easily and naturally in his childhood. He was never the nervous tourist fumbling for a word.

He could afford to go to Paris where he pottered about the river-side bookshops and visited the studios and cafés of the talkative English and American as well as French students and artists who mixed incessant argument with more occasional work at their easels. They are admirably described in the Parisian scenes in Of Human Bondage. He enlarged his own taste in painting by discovering the Impressionists, to whom he was introduced by the young Gerald Kelly, future President of the British Royal Academy. He found the city entrancing. In the second half of the nineteenth century France had led the world in the arts with supreme novelists and with the canvases which now change hands at fantastic sums. On its major stages flamed the magnificence of Sarah