Selina Hastings

I am an enormous fan of Somerset Maugham; one of the happiest days in my life as a reader came when I was in London a few years ago, and I stumbled across the complete works in hardbook in a second-hand shop on the Charing Cross Road. I was supposed to be travelling light, but ended up putting all twenty-six volumes into my suitcase and carrying the rest of my holiday luggage home in Tesco bags.

I didn't know much of his life, however, until I read Hastings's account, and I am rather glad show more that this was my first exposure to the real Maugham, given the controversy that surrounds his other biographers.

Hastings gives everything that I would have asked in her book, including a detailed and intriguing life history, peppered with quotes from Maugham and his contemporaries, and analyses of his most major works. As an aspiring writer myself it was especially interesting to learn what had inspired Maugham to create his best works of fiction, and how he developed as a writer.

The close attention to detail did have one drawback, and by necessity. The last chapters are almost intolerably sad, as we see Maugham accelerate into old age, lose his lover, Gerald Haxton, and be betrayed by his closest friend, Alan Searle. I have not been this moved by a book since I finished Bolano's 2666, and had this biography been a work of fiction I imagine I might have enjoyed it - and been saddened - just as much. show less

British author Selina Hastings, who has adapted such classic works as Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, as well as two Arthurian legends - Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - for children, here turns to another work of medieval literature. Basing her retelling of this medieval beast epic upon the very first translation into English - William Caxton's 1481 The History of Reynard the Fox - she offers up a story that uses new language and form, but retains the show more narrative super-structure of the original. As she puts it, "the basic plot remains unaltered, as do the animal characters in all their kindness, cruelty, trickiness and charm." Here we have all the major incidents of the history of Reynard, his mistreatment of the other animals, his treachery toward both friend and foe, and his great rhetorical skill, in getting himself out of trouble, when charged with various crimes in the court of the lion king...

First published in 1990, Selina Hastings' Reynard the Fox was one of the most contemporary Reynard retellings that I read, in the course of my research for my masters dissertation on three centuries of children's retellings of this tale in the Anglophone world. I believe that only Alain Vaës' 1994 Reynard the Fox postdated it, when it comes to the various retellings I examined. It's quite interesting to see how the editorial amendments of prior generations - the Victorians, and then the early 20th-century authors - are not kept up here. Hastings has great respect for her source material, and reproduces the original story, complete with Reynard's treachery, his non-repentance, and his eventual triumph. Leaving that aside, this is just a well-told, well-illustrated little volume - humorous, entertaining, and ultimately thought-provoking. Hastings claims in her introduction that Reynard dates back to Roman times, and to Aesop's 'Fable of the Sick Lion.' Whatever one makes of that claim, there can be no doubt that she has produced a Reynard well worth seeking out! show less

This is how biography should be written and I unhesitatingly recommend it - to the extent that I will now be seeking out Selina Hastings' account of Evelyn Waugh (she has also written biographies of Nancy Mitford and Rosamond Lehmann).

The achievement is all the more remarkable because Maugham, perfectly in character, systematically destroyed his own private papers and encouraged his correspondents to do the same, so Hastings has had to construct his life out of a paucity of material, much of show more which she must count as gossip.

Like all the best biographies, this is not just about a person but about the culture and environment in which that person flourished.

In Maugham's case, a central interest is in how a homosexual from the English middle classes managed to survive and prosper in an era when sexuality was being increasingly suppressed, often because British imperial morality had to be imposed to justify rule over 'lesser people'.

Maugham is not always a nice person but he is basically a decent one, whose skill (at the root of his creativity) was his ability to distance himself from the mores of his culture, observe them detachedly and then reproduce them in narratives that could be played back to its members.

That detachment had its autistic moments. The paradox that his was a type of mind that could learn its way into convention and conformity, often with snobbism and some ritual, but perhaps did not always understand that the subjects of his investigation might not take kindly to his exposure.

The comically suburban English middle classes of Malaya and a number of individuals found to their cost that Maugham, for all his grace and quiet charm, was treating them as mere raw material for sometimes coruscating insights into their own idiosyncrasies and delusions.

This biography covers some ninety years of history from the 1880s to the 1960s so no review can do justice to the issues raised but there are some themes that can be traced throughout the story.

Maugham's homosexuality is clearly one of these, with insights into a fairly free and open gay culture amongst the prosperous and their young acquisitions, largely conducted overseas - in Italy and France or on foreign trips outside the prying eyes of convention.

There is a genuine 'gay marriage' (avant la lettre) with Gerald Haxton, whose death has a devastating effect on Maugham, while his 'secretary' of his final decades, Alan Searle, comes across as an insecure camp 'poison dwarf' of a type not unfamiliar from the literature.

But there is also the tensions of a bourgeois family life with issues of inheritance, hatreds, rivalry and misunderstandings that would be 'normal' in any English family with some property - the murders investigated by Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot relied on such.

The work takes second place in the book to the life. Hastings is perhaps a little embarrassed by the fact that, though he was immensely popular, becoming one of the richest literary figures of his era (a super star like GB Shaw), his work is not managing to 'last'.

The truth is that he was a very fine story teller but one relating not so much to eternal human verities as the contingent verities at the high point of a crumbling empire.

The British Empire in the middle of the twentieth century was at its very largest but it was also over-stretched and reliant on exporting increasingly dim losers from minor public schools to administer it. The analogies with its successor empire today do not need to be laboured.

Whether his extensive body of drama (where he was a key figure in the first three decades of the London and New York stage) or his short stories that took up the story of empire where Conrad and Kipling left off, these were tales about a world which has not survived.

Maugham will thus always be of great historical interest and there are some 'eternal verities' (especially about snobbery and cruelty) to be taken from the work but he knew what he was and rarely tried to claim to be greater than he was.

The rest of the literary world treated him with courteous private disdain and perhaps that attitude, which festered as a form of literary elitism throughout the second half of the last century, is precisely why 'literature' has degenerated into a cult of self-reference for a minority.

The problem was that Maugham did have a vision of the world that was a little more advanced - he always tended to what would be called the centre-left today and was deeply anti-war despite his own bravery on occasions - but whenever he tried to do an HG Wells or GB Shaw, his efforts failed.

In his novels, fine breezy narrative and exquisite characterisation might be held back by a block of writing where he tried a dash of didacticism or literary experimentation but the reader would always be grateful when these moments passed.

Having said this, Hastings does an excellent job of rehabilitating and explaining him. Nearly all his significant books are still in print as paperbacks (in the UK) and are still enjoyed for what they are - excellent storytelling written subtly but at the level of the literate middle class.

There is much other interesting material in this book - about the interconnections between the transatlantic theatrical community, literary society and Hollywood and about the 'gay' component to the machine producing popular culture.

The internationalism of Maugham's world is also an eye-opener. He was half-French by upbringing (though entirely English in other respects), he travelled extensively and he shuttled between the US, England and the South of France because borders did not then matter to the creative and wealthy.

It makes one realise the extent to which Anglo-American hegemony (to which France was aligned) represented a freedom of movement that only really closed up with the second world war.

All in all, a superb biography, clearly written, astute and honest when dealing with gossip and with the man and his weaknesses. I am not sure I would have sought out the company of this bright and irascible man but I would have recognised him as fundamentally decent, better than his peers.

There are good photographs, a full index and short and judicious accounts of his works as they appeared. Fortunately, this really is a biography and not criticism masked by a life story. For this alone, Ms. Hastings should be thanked. show less

Riding out in Inglewood one day, King Arthur encounters the sinister Black Knight, who challenges him to a battle for his very crown. With his sword Excalibur lying far away in Camelot, Arthur is rendered immobile by his foe's unearthly power, and given one chance to redeem himself: if he returns in three days' time, with the answer to the Black Knight's question - "What is it that women most desire?" - he and his crown will be saved. And so the king sets out to discover the answer to this show more perennial question, eventually discovering what he needs in the guise of the "Loathly Lady." But is he willing to pay the price she demands for her information? Will any of his faithful knights be willing to sacrifice themselves in marriage to so hideous a creature...?

This gorgeous picture-book retelling of the story of Sir Gawain's marriage is one of two Arthurian titles that author Selina Hastings and illustrator Juan Wijngaard have adapted together - the other being Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - and presents one of my favorite medieval tales. Found in many sources, from the fifteenth-century poem, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, to the Wife of Bath's Tale, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this story emphasizes a reality that is still under attack today: that what women most want and need is choice. It is also one of the few Beauty and the Beast variants where it is the woman who is the enchanted ugly spouse, as opposed to the man.

Selina Hasting's narrative is engaging, but it is Juan Wijngaard's gorgeous artwork that really makes Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady outstanding! From the decorative endpapers to the lovely borders that surround each page, everything about the visual design of this book is appealing. The paintings themselves, whether full-page or smaller inset images, are breathtakingly beautiful, and wonderfully expressive. The facial expressions of the court ladies and knights are perfectly captured. All in all, a wonderful retelling of a wonderful tale, recommended to young readers who appreciate such stories. show less