Maugham (1980)

I enjoyed this book. It was interesting. I would recommend it for those interested in Somerset Maugham.

Yes, it was rather gossipy. So? It seemed to be well-researched and was extensively documented. IOW, it was a true story of a person's life, warts and all. ( )

Ted Morgan

Maugham: A Biography

Triad/Granada, Paperback, 1981.

First published, 1980

-------------------------------------------------​

Ted Morgan's work is spectacular as a research. The whole, long and varied, life of Somerset Maugham is there, year by year, month by month, even week by week sometimes, compiled from numerous meticulously numbered sources. The style is gripping, gossiping and absorbing. It's a very enjoyable read, even if Mr Morgan could have saved some nasty details of Maugham's sexual life. But perhaps it is better to have them. Still only one star. Why? Simply because the book tells a great deal about Maugham's life in facts and figures and absolutely nothing about himself as a personality - except the usual nonsense.

First and foremost, Mr. Morgan makes the usual mistake of everybody who is writing about Maugham - he sees everything in his life through hidden homosexuality and hate for the fair sex. That's a very narrow point of view I should say, if it is point of view at all. Many of Mr Morgan's conclusions about this plot and that character of Maugham, let alone about Maugham's own character, resemble quite suspiciously to pure gossip. Or maybe it would be more accurately to say 'fantasy'. I wonder where this man saw so much ridiculous nonsense in so many if not all of Maugham's works. In the end this is just his opinion and his opinion is valuable to him. The same is true for the numerous opinions of others who knew, more or less intimately, Maugham through his life. All of them seem to suffer from more or less the same prejudices - hidden homosexuality expressed everywhere is his fiction, the same with the misogyny, lack of style in his works, cynicism and so on and so forth. Why nobody, biographers especially, ever trusts his own nonfiction (!) writings about himself but everybody is only too willing to accept people's obscene gossip as a gospel truth? Human nature, I guess. And Mr Morgan, despite his godlike condescension and highly patronizing style, is all too human.

The Preface of Mr Morgan's work is quite revealing about his aims when he sat to write this book. He honestly says that he wanted to find what Maugham had to hide and why he always was so secretive about his personal life. That sounds like Mr Morgan wanted to write something very well researched but gossipy and chatty, with lots of facts about the life of the great writer and very little if anything about his personality. So he did. He says that Maugham had glaring defects but they should not be used to diminish his position, yet that's precisely what he does for 500 pages or so. As if anybody, Ted Morgan included, was perfect. If Maugham had really had more defects than the common run of men, which I very much doubt, that must surely have been due to, on one hand, the fact that he was very rich and enjoyed the life to the fullest degree, and on the other hand - and infinitely more important! - because everything is his life was scrutinized by envy-ridden and conceited fools like Mr Morgan. I wonder if something very much better would come out should someone dig out all skeletons from Mr Morgan's cupboard, or anybody else's for that matter.

Again in this extremely enlightening preface, Mr Morgan tells us that Maugham deliberately falsified his life in his writings for which he presents the really very damning proof of Maugham's works of fiction (!) and few wrong years in his collection of notes A Writer's Notebook. This is so preposterous that hardly deserves any comment at all and I must be a damned fool to bother with it, but nobody's perfect after all. Mr Morgan obviously has no idea what 'fiction' means and even more obviously he doesn't believe a single word of what Maugham wrote about it - if he ever read it at all. Or maybe Mr Morgan, considerably helped by his tremendous arrogance, thinks he knows more for the art of fiction than Maugham did? Not impossible, of course, but extremely unlikely for sure. To draw conclusions about the life of Maugham from the lives of Willie Ashenden or Philip Carey is simply idiotic. These gentlemen are characters of fiction who were just based - please note: based! - on Maugham himself; they surely had qualities and experiences he never had and vice versa. The narrator of a story, in the first or in the third person singular, is just as character as any other. Maugham wrote a great deal about that at least half a dozen times; but somebody has to bother reading and thinking and that's rather difficult for most people. Maugham might well have said that his whole childhood was in Of Human Bondage ''word by word'' but he also said, nay even wrote, that looking back on this novel after 20 years or so he couldn't tell fact from fiction. I would rather believe the latter and anyway who could tell which one is the truer one? How about the years in A Writer's Notebook? Have you read that book at all, Mr Morgan? I don't believe you did. In the very first lines of it Maugham says that it is possible that here and there he might be ''year or two out'' but he does not think it of any importance. Neither do I. In any case, such small discrepancy is completely irrelevant, and quite understandable since these notes were published some 50 years after they had been made and Maugham was not so careful about dates and years anyway. But to use this as accusation in deliberately falsifying one's life is nothing short of despicable. Maugham was notoriously vague about dates but for my own part I am much more interested in his reactions to and thoughts about the First World War, the success of his plays or his travels through the South Seas, to name just a few examples, than in the exact year in which all these events took place.

But taking an unfair advantage is one of Mr Morgan's specialities, actually: he does pretty much the same with Maugham's last few years when the great writer suffered horrible mental breakdown and a lot of scandals. How much of the latter was due to the former is debatable, but dwelling too much on both does emphasize unduly their significance. Nor is Mr Morgan free of the usual prejudices to the infamous memoir of Maugham Looking Back from 1962, another piece of writing that Mr Morgan probably never read at all, or at least never read seriously; his claim that Maugham had not even one good word for his wife is grossly inaccurate (he mentions that she had great taste and good eye for opportune, neither is a small compliment from Maugham's pen), Morgan's referring to their mutual joy of bringing a daughter together is pure fantasy (no such thing ever happened due to Maugham's constant travels and work and if he had been a bad father, his wife certainly had not been a better mother). If Mr Morgan had taken a bit more trouble, he would have known that the marriage of Maugham was not a marriage of convenience but a marriage of obligation. That's why it was even bigger disaster than a marriage for love.

Mr Morgan tells us also that since Maugham spent his life prying into the lives of others, we - and he means he, of course - are justified to pry into his private live. And prying he does. Maugham did pry into the lives of others all right but not only for his own amusement: most of all for his work as a writer of fiction where he put, as he once said, more or less everything that happened to him. In the rare cases when he offered something saucy about a colleague of him, alive or dead, in a nonfiction piece he did so in a fine taste and never got obscene (the infamous memoir Looking Back included!) even if he often was quite candid; too candid for most people indeed. Mr Morgan pries into Maugham's life solely for his own, and rather perverse, amusement; his sole justification is that Maugham's sexual orientation and his sexual life were of so immense an importance for his work. Balls! Before reading this crap of a biography, I had never been able to see any such nonsense in any work of Maugham. Nor am I able to see it now. I guess I am a misogynist and a homosexual too. That might be so, who knows... But so might Mr Morgan be a feminist and an anti-homosexual, might he not? Now, who's going to prove whose point of view is the more distorted and the more perverse one? Who's going to judge who's right and who's wrong? I wish, for his own sake, that Mr Morgan had restrained his passion to judge; for it only makes him ridiculous.

Seriously, I wonder why so many people so much dislike Maugham on the grounds of his life. Let's talk quite frankly for a minute and see which are the most horrible things about Somerset Maugham.

1. He was homosexual, sex maniac and had sex with Malayan boys.
So what? Are you going to bed with this man or are you reading his books? Do you really think that the life philosophy of one is despicable only because his private life was obscene? And what does obscene mean anyway? He was homosexual? So he was. The world is full of homosexuals. I am not one of them but I don't mind them at all. He was sex maniac? Who's not? I am. Are you not? Come off it, people. If you don't have the money, that doesn't at all mean that you wouldn't do what you now think obscene if you had; and if you had the guts. What else? Ah, yes, he had sex with Malayan boys? So what? He paid the guys, he fucked them. It's called prostitution, it's as old as the hills and it won't die before the world itself. I don't believe Maugham ever raped anybody. Frankly, I couldn't care less if he did. Actually, it would only have made him more interesting because he would have been even more perfect proof than he is now for what was the main theme in all his works: how extremely complicated and impossible to understand or explain the human nature really is.

2. He was a senile old who tried to disinherit his daughter.
So he was. It is quite natural for a man in his late eighties to go crazy, especially after so crazy a life. Was Maugham the first person in this world who tried to disinherit his daughter? Of course not. Fine example what your notoriety and the fickle public opinion can do for you: make the next world war out of an ordinary family scandal and a real monster of depravity out of anybody.

3. He attacked his deceased wife in his infamous memoir Looking Back.
Have you read this memoir at all? At least the few parts serialised in Show or Sunday Express in 1962. Rantings of a senile old man it has been called. Far from it. Maugham's view of Syrie is much more balanced than most people try (who probably never read the piece) to make it out. He says flatly several times that she had no resources in herself but also that she had great taste and a good eye for opportune; he mentions that she made him scenes but also that she was an admirable hostess. Coming from Maugham's lips, or pen in this case, both ''great taste'' and ''admirable hostess'' are great compliments indeed. He says she was dishonest but does not try to diminish her success as a decorator; he is sympathetic to her pecuniary problems and embarrassed by his own negligence of the matter but he does not humiliate himself unnecessarily. And what does it matter that she was dead at the time of writing and could not defend herself? If a historical fact about somebody is true, it is so regardless of his or her being alive or dead. Maugham may criticize somewhat harshly but he is no less harsh to himself. He never gets scathing or vulgar. He just tells a great deal of truth, perhaps the complete truth about his long and complicated relationship with Syrie. From his own point of view of course, but there is no reason to suggest that it is a more distorted one than any other, including all of Syrie's defenders.

What else? Ah, yes, of course.

4. The dirty old man was shamelessly rich.
So he was. He worked like a dog for ten years after the success of his first novel, until his great success on the stage came and freed him of any financial problems until the end of his life. What do you think he did? Leading loose and dissolute life without working at all? Balls! Quite on the contrary, Maugham worked harder than when he was a young man of modest means. He never stopped writing, neither after his success on the stage, nor after his buying the luxurious Villa Mauresque in the late 1920s, nor after his precarious flight from there during the Second World War. Somerset Maugham spent at least 65 from his 91 years on this earth writing. For that time he wrote no fewer than 20 novels, 109 short stories, 26 plays, 3 travel books and 10 books with essays. Very few people - if any - deserve their money more than Maugham did!

5. He was a misogynist to the bone.
He might well have been. Big deal. I have to admit that if I look more carefully in his work under a certain prejudiced angle, I discern something like that. But it is so slight it hardly deserves to be mentioned. Its significance has been emphasized and overemphasized to a ridiculous degree. And why nobody considers that Maugham almost always had a deep and obviously genuine affection for his heroines, no matter how cynical, callous or loose they are. Rosie, Kitty and Isabel are just a few but very fine examples. And why when people quote his sensuous descriptions of male characters as a very important proof how his homosexuality shows up in his fiction, never care a damn about his not so much less sensual descriptions of women: the three aforementioned would do nicely here too, but so would Catalina, Betty Weldon-Burns, Elisabeth Vermont, La Falterona, Jane, Margery or Ethel.

When all is said and done, when we come down to brass tacks, the most probable reason why so many people are consumed with envy and malice toward Maugham is that whatever the details one thing is sure: he made a great success of his life and most people are terribly conscious what an indifferent hash they have made of theirs.

Coming back to Mr Morgan's masterpiece, I continue wondering why the vast majority of people are so willing to know all facts from the lives of the great, especially their sexual conquests in a highly pornographic detail indeed. Nasty pleasures suit well dirty-minded creatures, I guess. I would much sooner know what a person thinks of himself and his craft, how he reflects upon his life and what his opinions of the eternal questions of human speculation are, than whom he went to dinner or to bed with, how much he paid for this picture or that house and so on. That's why Maugham's The Summing Up is a really great book and the perfect way to learn a lot about him, but without the dirty details; Mr Morgan's hackwork cannot hold a candle to such masterpiece, nay it can't even be compared with it. I respect and admire Maugham especially because of his statement in the beginning of The Summing Up that this is not a book about his doings and he is content to maintain his privacy on certain matters. By that he certainly meant the sexual and other delicate aspects because pretty much everything else, and pretty much more important about his personality, is on these pages. I don't know who is that fairly normal person who would like to have his sexual life exposed in great detail to the public, let alone his private fantasies. To my mind that's perfectly perverse and obscene behaviour. I quite understand why Maugham was so reluctant to any biography of him during his lifetime. He must have known pretty well what a hideous rubbish, what an epitome of obscenity, that would be. If his ghost can read Mr Morgan's pathetic attempt from somewhere, I am sure he would chuckle quietly, entirely content how right he was.

Still the book is quite outstanding as a research and worth reading (once!) if you want tons of facts and figures, most of them rather useless. But it must be read only after reading the whole (or almost the whole) of Maugham's oeuvre. Indeed many of the biographical facts come from Maugham's own books and prefaces to them, in most cases Mr Morgan just corrects the years and offers futile speculations as if his opinion was the yardstick that Maugham's life and work should be measured to. His important and relevant contributions to the facts of Maugham's life are few, there are none whatsoever about Maugham's personality. The excerpts of Maugham's letters, most of them appeared for the first time, are the only invaluable thing here. As always, what Maugham wrote about himself, and he wrote a great deal, reveals much, so much more than all opinions of the others - and in a much finer and devoid of obnoxious vulgarity style. I think Maugham was an extremely honest man about himself, he just thought that his intimate life is nobody's business but his own. And quite right he was.

If you don't know anything about Somerset Maugham, I strongly suggest you should read his own books first. This will surely deprive you of the tons of prejudices that his biographers invariably have, but it may enrich your soul to some extent. Or it may not. There's only one way to see. If you want to start with fiction, try his short stories, if you want non-fiction try his travel books and essays and, should you like them, go on with The Summing Up. Books like Mr Morgan's can only enrich your soul, if that's possible at all, with pettiness, envy and vulgarity.

For my own part, considering the personality of the great writer rather than the interesting but ultimately not so important facts of his life, I would rather believe what Mr Maugham wrote about himself than what Mr Morgan gossips about him. If that means lack of several correct years and explicit porn content, I shall happily remain ignorant of them both. ( )

Pitiless. Perhaps Maugham (or few of us, indeed) doesn't deserve much pity. Still, to write a book of over 700 pages about someone with whom you have so little sympathy is a bit off-putting. ( )