Customer Reviews

Maugham: A Biography

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"Maugham" remains the quintessential biography of this enigmatic figure. The most complete and thorough examination of the life and tramas and adventures that made up the life of the man and the writer. As Morgan states, Maugham is the most popular writer of serious fiction that England has produced since Charles Dickens. Weather that fiction is literature or not remains to be seen by his fans and by his critics the discussion has been put aside forever. Somerset Maugham is barley mentioned in acadamia. But Maugham had a genius for story telling (Max Beerbohm) and he told more than two hundred of them in his plays, novels, essays and most admirably in his short stories. As Alexander Freere said, I you don't think he can write, read "The Outstation" or "The Alien Corn" and then sit down and write a better one. His barroom fight scene in "The Moon and Sixpense" is superior to anything by Hemmingway and it was written six years before "The Nick Adams Stories" or The Torrents of Spring" were published. Maugham's story is so fantastic that it is no wonder he was such a good friend of Churchill's. Churchill, of course had an equally eventfull life. Maugham was as famous a playwright in the teens and the twenties as Neil Simon, but he was also a Doctor an ambulance driver on the Western Front and a spy who was given the assignment to try to squelch the Bolshevik Revolution. All in a twenty year span during which he wrote ten unsuccessful novels and "Of Human Bondage". He was also the first great world traveller author with the possible exception of Conrad. Maugham went nearly everywhere one could expect to travel during the days of World Wars and steamships. He wrote about his travels in short stories that are still widely read by many of my fellow travellers along with the first guru tripping novel,"The Razor's Edge." Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque on the French Riveria was the place he entertained royally. He was a great instructor to his chef and an innovator of cuisine. He was at various times friends with Henry James, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Noel Coward and Graham Greene, but the reason this book influenced me more than any book I have ever read is the additional cast of characters that I was unaware of before reading Morgan's book. Writers like; Arnold Bennett, Lytton Strachey, Aubrey Beardsley, Ruppert Brook and scores of other people whose work I am now familiar with because of this biography. This book has been critized by many fans for being too rough on the writer. Labeling Maugham a women hater, cheap, anti semetic, cynical, bitter at being considered a second rater and a promiscuous Bi-sexual who became exclusively homosexual after the age of forty to almost a pornographic obsession. In other words, only being able to enjoy anonymous encounters. All this criticism is unfounded. Morgan paints a sympathetic balanced portrait of a painfully sensitive human being who lived through a time that is difficult to judge. I can count myself as Somerset Maugham's biggest fan and I love women. I have travelled to many Maugham spots on the globe: Tahiti, Capri, Trivandrum, Pagan and Haiphong. I even visited his home in South Carolina and his writers cabin. This is a Great Book.

This biography by Ted Morgan is both excellent and meticulous. Inside we find the life of a writer whose voluminous oeuvre, and length of life, would confound and demoralize a less ambitious person. Maugham was a diminutive, flawed man who created a legend that awes and dazzles to this day. I really think that the biographer should be congratulated on lifting so many threads from so many primary sources that allow us to see so vividly the paradoxical nature of the Maugham's personality. I do believe that Morgan at times was unduly negative in regards to his subject's worth as a writer, however. The fact is that even today Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, and Of Human Bondage do more than hold up, indeed they are monumental works. I still find them deeply personal and deeply moving. Regardless of his minor publications, and there were many, Maugham is a man for whom we must revere and cherish. Young minds would due well to take note of his artistic integrity and devotion to craft. I found the story of his life inspiring.

Yes, this is a fun book to read and a delightful look into a complex man, W.Somerset Maugham. I enjoy reading biographies and especially those about Maugham, whose work I admire and read and re-read--especially, Of Human Bondage. I have read many bios of Maugham, including those written by his nephew, Robin Maugham. However, Morgan's very expansive and well dcoumented and researched book is very, very interesting and the best I can recommend to Maugham's fans---and there are quite a few around--still. Gerald Haxton, Maugham's lover, was a fascinating person-someone I would have liked to have known--I think I did know someone like that, thinking it over now. I recommend this book, and do so highly with praise. Great photos as well.

If you have gotten much pleasure reading the works of W.Somerset Maugham as I have, you should not waste your money trying to find a copy of this book, as I did. Simply put, Morgan's work is a very well researched, poorly written,extremely negative account of Maugham's life. The entire book consists primarily of personal and professional attacks of every type imaginable on Maugham. Absolutely the worst biography I've ever read.

Book received as ordered and within the time frame.
This is my second bio of Maugham. Have been reading many
of Maughams books for the last 60 years. Most enjoyable.

Ted Morgan

Maugham: A Biography

Triad/Granada, Paperback, 1981.

First published in 1980

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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.

When all is said and done, when we come down to brass tacks, the most probable reason why so many people - such a Mr Morgan - 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.