Biography
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Born in Paris, of
Irish ancestry, Somerset Maugham was to lead a fascinating life and would become
famous for his mastery of short evocative stories that were often set in the
more obscure and remote areas of the British Empire. Suffering from a bad
stammer, he received a classic public school education at King's school in
Canterbury, Kent. Rather more unconventionally he studied at Heidelburg
university where he read philosophy and literature. He then studied in
London, eventually qualifying as a surgeon at St Thomas's hospital. He
conducted his year's medical practice in the slums of the East End. It was
here that he found material for his first, rather lurid, novel Liza of
Lambeth in 1897 and much of the material for his critically acclaimed
autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage although this wasn't to be published
until 1915. He moved to Paris where he would strike up a successful working
relationship with Laurence Housman and write a number of plays that would be
run in London from 1908. At the outbreak of The Great War he first served
with a Red Cross unit in France before taking up a far more interesting
assignment as secret agent in Geneva and then Petrograd. In Russia, he was
given the rather mammoth job of attempting to prevent the Russian Revolution
from starting. His novel Ashenden published in 1928 would draw on these
eclectic experiences. Continuing with more peacable travels, Maugham took to the South Seas,
where he visited the island of Tahiti and on which he based his novel The
Moon and Sixpence. Sickness would then force Maugham to return and remain in
a Scottish tuberculosis sanatorium. However, on recovery, he returned to the
Far East and collected imperial information and experiences that would form
the basis of many short stories, plays and novels: East of Suez in 1922, Our
Betters in 1923 and The Letter
in 1927, are amongst the better known of these. Returning to settle in France in 1928, he wrote what many regard as his
satirical masterpiece Cakes and Ale A literary biography within a novel that
examined the private sin that accompanies public success. The winds of war
would not allow Maugham to remain in France indefinitely. A British agent
once more, he was forced to flee from France with a single suitcase one night
in 1940. He settled in the United States for the duration of the war, writing
the semi-mystical The Razor's Edge there in 1945. Somerset Maugham was the master of the short, concise novel and he could
convey relationships, greed and ambition with a startling reality. The remote
locations of the quietly magnificent yet decaying British Empire offered him
beautiful cavasses on which to write his stories and plays. The real-life
inhabitants of these locations were frankly shocked at being portrayed as so
trivial, parochial and vacuous creatures. Maugham would enjoy the undying
hatred of many a South-East Asian planter and his wife for the rest of his
life. Yet, for the rest of us, his realistic depictions of the boredom and drudgery
of plantation life, and the desire and trappings of what they would regard as
civilisation, can re-evoke what were perhaps the more genuine feelings felt
by many of the planters and civil servants in the further flung reaches of
the Empire. His English is clear and lucid and this makes his books easy to
come to terms with. His works are often full of the basest, and yet more
interesting, of the human vices but can still evoke the day to day feelings
and emotions that allow us to understand and identify with his characters. A
complex and interesting character, Somerset Maugham managed to catch much of
the darker essence of Empire. |
Published by Stephen Luscombe (The British Empire)
© http://www.britishempire.co.uk/biography/maugham.htm
Other biographies: Next
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Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Saturnino Figueroa Guerola
safigue@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press
