Background and early years William Somerset Maugham came from a family of lawyers. His grandfather, Robert Maugham, was a prominent
solicitor and co-founder of the
Law Society of England and Wales. his wife, Edith Mary,
née Snell, lived most of her life in France, where all the couple's children were born. Robert Maugham handled the legal affairs of the
British Embassy there, as his eldest surviving son, Charles, later did. The second son,
Frederic, became a
barrister, and had a distinguished legal career in Britain –
The Times described him as "a great legal figure" – serving as a
Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (1935–1938) and
Lord Chancellor (1938–1939). The two younger sons became writers: Henry (1868–1904) wrote poetry, essays and travel books. Shortly before the birth of the Maughams' fourth son the government of France proposed a new law under which all boys born on French soil to foreign parents would automatically be French citizens and liable to conscription for military service. The British ambassador,
Lord Lyons, had a maternity ward set up within his embassy – which was legally recognised as UK territory – enabling British couples in France to circumvent the new law, and it was there that William Somerset Maugham was born on 25 January 1874. Maugham never greatly liked his middle name – which commemorated a great-uncle named after
General Sir Henry Somerset – and was known by family and friends throughout his life as "Willie". Maugham's mother died of
tuberculosis in January 1882, a few days after his eighth birthday. He later said that for him her loss was "a wound that never entirely healed" and even in old age he kept her photograph at his bedside. Two and a half years after his mother's death his father died, and Maugham was sent to England to live with his paternal uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, the vicar of
Whitstable in Kent. After spending the first ten years of his life in Paris, Maugham found an unwelcome contrast in life at Whitstable, which according to his biographer
Ted Morgan "represented social obligation and conformity, the narrow-minded provincialism of nineteenth-century small-town English life". He found his uncle and aunt well-meaning but remote by contrast with the loving warmth of his home in Paris; he became shy and developed a
stammer that stayed with him all his life. In a 2004 biography of Maugham, Jeffrey Meyers comments, "His stammer, a psychological and physical handicap, and his gradual awareness of his homosexuality made him furtive and secretive". Maugham's biographer
Selina Hastings describes as "the first step in Maugham's loss of faith" his disillusion when the God in whom he had been taught to believe failed to answer his prayers for relief from his troubles. In his teens he became a lifelong non-believer. From 1885 to 1890 Maugham attended
The King's School, Canterbury, where he was regarded as an outsider and teased for his poor English (French had been his first language), his short stature, his stammer, and his lack of interest in sport. He left as soon as he could, although he later developed an affection for the school, and became a generous benefactor. A modest legacy from his father enabled him to go to
Heidelberg University to study. His aunt, who was German, arranged accommodation for him, and aged sixteen he travelled to Germany. For the next year and a half he studied literature, philosophy and German. During his time in Heidelberg he had his first sexual affair; it was with
John Ellingham Brooks, an Englishman ten years his senior. Brooks encouraged Maugham's ambitions to be a writer and introduced him to the works of
Schopenhauer and
Spinoza. and his stammer precluded a career in the church or the law even if either had attracted him. His uncle ruled out the civil service, believing that it was no longer a career for gentlemen after
reforms requiring applicants to pass an entrance examination. A family friend found Maugham a position in an accountant's office in London, which he endured for a month before resigning. The local physician in Whitstable suggested the medical profession, and Maugham's uncle agreed. Maugham, who had been writing steadily since he was 15, intended to make his career as an author, but he dared not tell his guardian. Maugham took rooms in
Westminster, across the
Thames from the hospital. He made himself comfortable there, filled many notebooks with literary ideas, and continued writing nightly, while studying for his medical degree. In 1897 he published his first novel,
Liza of Lambeth, a tale of working-class adultery and its consequences. It drew its details from his
obstetric duties in South London slums. He wrote near the opening of the novel: "it is impossible always to give the exact unexpurgated words of Liza and the other personages of the story; the reader is therefore entreated with his thoughts to piece out the necessary imperfections of the dialogue". The book received mixed reviews.
The Evening Standard commented that there had not been so powerful a story of slum life since
Rudyard Kipling's
The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot (1890), and praised the author's "vividness and knowledge ... extraordinary gift of directness and concentration ... His characters have an astounding amount of vitality".
The Westminster Gazette praised the writing but deplored the subject matter, and
The Times also conceded the author's skill – "Mr Maugham seems to aspire, and not unsuccessfully, to be the
Zola of the
New Cut" – but thought him "capable of better things [than] this singularly unpleasant novel". The first print run sold out within three weeks and a reprint was quickly arranged. Maugham qualified as a physician the month after the publication of
Liza of Lambeth but he immediately abandoned medicine and embarked on his 65-year career as a writer. He later said, "I took to it as a duck takes to water." Before the publication of his next novel,
The Making of a Saint (1898), Maugham travelled to Spain. He found Mediterranean lands much to his liking, for what his biographer
Frederic Raphael calls their "
douceur de vivre missing under grim English skies". He based himself in
Seville, where he grew a moustache, smoked cigars, took lessons in the guitar, (gender carefully unspecified, as Hastings comments).
The Making of a Saint, a historical novel, attracted less attention than
Liza of Lambeth and its sales were unremarkable. Maugham continued to write assiduously and within five years he published two more novels and a collection of short stories, and had his first play produced; but a success to match that of his first book eluded him. Between 1903 and 1906 he wrote two more plays, a travel book and two novels, but his next big commercial and critical success did not come until October 1907, when his comedy
Lady Frederick opened at the
Court Theatre in London. He had written it four years earlier, but numerous managements turned it down until
Otho Stuart accepted it and cast the popular
Ethel Irving in the title role. It ran for 422 performances at five different
West End theatres. By the next year, while the run of
Lady Frederick continued, Maugham had three other plays running simultaneously in London.'', 1908)|alt=drawing of Shakespeare in front of theatre posters for four different plays by Maugham all running in the West End Maugham later said that he made comparatively little money from this unprecedented theatrical achievement, but it made his reputation.
Punch printed a cartoon of Shakespeare's ghost looking concerned about the ubiquity of Maugham's plays. Between 1908 and the outbreak of the
First World War in 1914, Maugham wrote a further eight plays, but his stage successes did not completely distract him from writing novels. His supernatural thriller
The Magician (1908) had a principal character modelled on
Aleister Crowley, a well-known
occultist. Crowley took offence and wrote a critique of the novel in
Vanity Fair, charging Maugham with "varied, shameless and extensive" plagiarism. Maugham was acutely conscious of the fate of
Oscar Wilde, whose arrest and imprisonment took place when Maugham was in his early twenties. Lifelong, Maugham was highly reticent about homosexual encounters, but it was thought by at least two of his lovers that at this period in his life he had recourse to young male prostitutes. In 1913 he proposed to the actress Sue Jones, daughter of the playwright
Henry Arthur Jones; she declined his offer. In 1914 he began an affair with
Syrie Wellcome, whom he had known since 1910. She was married to the pharmaceutical magnate
Henry Wellcome, but the couple had formally separated in 1909, after which she had a succession of partners, including the retailer
Harry Gordon Selfridge.
First World War By 1914 Maugham was famous, with thirteen plays and eight novels completed. In the weeks before the war began, Maugham had been completing his novel
Of Human Bondage, a
Bildungsroman with substantial autobiographical elements. The critic
John Sutherland says of it: According to some of Maugham's intimates, the main female character, the manipulative Mildred, was based on "a youth, probably a rent boy, with whom he became infatuated". Raphael comments that there is no firm evidence for this, and Meyers suggests that she is based on Harry Phillips, a young man whom Maugham had taken to Paris as, nominally, his secretary for a prolonged stay in 1905. Maugham proofread
Of Human Bondage at
Malo-les-Bains, near
Dunkirk, during a lull in his ambulance duties. When the book was published in 1915 some of the initial reviews were favourable but many, both in Britain and in the US, were unenthusiastic. The
New York World described the romantic obsession of the protagonist as "the sentimental servitude of a poor fool". Bryan Connon comments in
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "After this it seemed that Maugham could not fail, and the public eagerly bought his novels [and] volumes of his carefully crafted short stories". The baby was legally the daughter of Henry Wellcome, although he had not seen his wife for many years. He successfully sued for divorce in 1916, citing Maugham as
co-respondent. He was recruited by
Sir John Wallinger, a friend of Syrie, portrayed as the spymaster "R" in the
Ashenden stories Maugham wrote after the war. Syrie and Liza were with him for part of the year, providing a convincing domestic cover, and his profession as a writer enabled him to travel about and stay in hotels without attracting attention. His covert job, which was in violation of Switzerland's neutrality laws, was to coordinate the work of British agents in enemy territory and dispatch their information to London. In November 1916 Maugham was asked by the intelligence service to go to the
South Seas. He was reunited with Haxton, who joined him as secretary-companion. In addition to his intelligence work, Maugham gathered material for his fiction wherever he went. He was, by his own account, not a particularly imaginative or inventive person, but he studied people and places and used them, sometimes with minimal alteration or disguise, in his stories. He was helped in this by Haxton – extrovert and gregarious in contrast with Maugham's shyness – who became what Morgan terms an "intermediary with the outside world". Maugham wrote of Haxton: After the South Seas trip Maugham visited the US and was joined by Syrie. In May 1917 they married at a ceremony in
New Jersey. He entered the marriage from a sense of duty rather than from personal inclination, and the two quickly began to grow apart. She returned to England and he continued with his work as a secret agent. He was selected by
Sir William Wiseman of British Intelligence to go to Russia, where the overthrow of the monarchy threatened to lead to a Russian withdrawal from the war. Maugham's job was to counter German propaganda, and to encourage the moderate republican Russian government under
Alexander Kerensky to continue fighting. He arrived in
Petrograd in August, too late to influence the outcome: in November, Kerensky was supplanted by
Lenin and the
Bolsheviks, who took Russia out of the war. By that time Maugham was ill with tuberculosis. He returned to Britain and spent three months in a sanatorium in Scotland. While there he wrote a
farce,
Home and Beauty, which was presented at the
Playhouse Theatre in August 1919 starring
Gladys Cooper and
Charles Hawtrey. In the same year Maugham published one of his best-known novels, and "a triumph [that] has given me such pleasure and entertainment as rarely comes my way"; one described it as "an exhibition of the beast in man, done with such perfect art that it is beyond praise".
1920s: travel and divorce in her shop, 1921|alt=White woman in smart day clothes, including a hat, in a shop full of antiques and objets d'art After the war Maugham had to choose between living in Britain or being with Haxton, because the latter was refused admission to the country. The lifelong ban followed his arrest and trial over a homosexual incident in 1915. He was acquitted, but was nonetheless registered as an "undesirable alien". When in Britain, Maugham lived with his wife at their house in
Marylebone, but the couple were temperamentally incompatible, and their relationship grew increasingly fractious. He spent much time travelling with Haxton. They visited the Far East together in 1919–20, keeping Maugham away from home for six months. In late 1920 Maugham and Haxton set out on a trip that lasted more than a year. In the US they spent time in
Hollywood, which Maugham despised from the first, but found highly remunerative. They then visited San Francisco and sailed to
Honolulu and Australia before the final leg of their voyage, to Singapore and the
Malay Peninsula, where they remained for six months. Maugham, as always, observed closely and collected material for his stories wherever they went. His fellow author
Cyril Connolly wrote, "there will remain a story-teller's world from Singapore to the
Marquesas that is exclusively and forever Maugham". In 1922–23 Maugham's next extended trip was in south and east Asia, with stops at Colombo, Rangoon,
Mandalay, Bangkok and Hanoi. In Maugham's absence his wife found an occupation, becoming a sought-after interior designer. Her concentration on her work briefly lessened the domestic tensions at the couple's house when Maugham was in residence. By 1925, Maugham, learning that his wife was spreading scandal about his private life and had taken lovers of her own, was reconsidering his future. After another long trip to the Far East, he agreed with Syrie that they would live separately, she in London and he at
Cap Ferrat in the south of France. They divorced in 1929. During the 1920s Maugham published one novel (
The Painted Veil, (1925)), three books of short stories (
The Trembling of a Leaf (1921),
The Casuarina Tree (1926) and
Ashenden (1928)) and a travel book (
On a Chinese Screen, (1922)) but much of his work was for the theatre. He wrote seven plays during the decade:
The Unknown (1920),
The Circle (1921),
East of Suez (1922), ''The Camel's Back
(1923), The Constant Wife (1926), The Letter (1927) and The Sacred Flame (1928). His longest-running play of the decade, and of his whole career, was Our Betters''. It was written in 1915 and staged in New York in 1917, for a satisfactory but not unusual 112 performances, but when produced in the West End in 1923 it was played 548 times.
1930–1940 – caricatured as Alroy Kear in
Cakes and Ale|alt=middle aged white man, clean shaven, with receding hair, smartly dressed in a lounge suit, semi-profile In 1930 Maugham published the novel
Cakes and Ale, regarded by Connon as the most likely of the author's works to survive. Hastings quotes a contemporary's view that Kear was Maugham's revenge on Walpole for "a stolen boyfriend, an unrequited love and an old canker of jealousy". By the early 1930s Maugham had grown tired of the theatre. He told
Noël Coward in 1933: Maugham's thirty-second and last play was
Sheppey (1933). It was a departure from his previous style; its moral ambiguity and equivocal ending puzzled the critics and the public. Despite some help from Coward in the drafting and having
Ralph Richardson as star and
John Gielgud as director, it ran for a modest 83 performances. Maugham later wrote, "I grew conscious that I was no longer in touch with the public that patronises the theatre. This happens in the end to most dramatists, and they are wise to accept the warning. It is high time for them then to retire. I did so with relief." Raphael suggests that Maugham now wished to write to please himself rather than others. , Maugham's home from 1927|alt=view of leafy promontory into the Mediterranean Sea Maugham's days of lengthy trips to distant places were mostly behind him, but at Kipling's suggestion he sailed to the West Indies in 1936. The British colonies there failed to provide him with anything like the material he had gathered in the Asian outposts in the 1920s, but the French penal settlement on
Devil's Island furnished him with some stories. During a visit to India in 1938 he found his interest prompted less by the British expatriates than by Indian philosophers and ascetics: "As soon as the Maharajas realized that I didn't want to go on tiger hunts but that I was interested in seeing poets and philosophers they were very helpful." He visited the Hindu sage
Ramana Maharishi at his
ashram, and later used him as the model for the spiritual guru of his 1944 novel ''
The Razor's Edge''. Throughout the decade Maugham, with Haxton in attendance, lived and entertained lavishly at his house on Cap Ferrat, the
Villa La Mauresque. His domestic staff there comprised thirteen servants. When the
Second World War began in 1939 he stayed in his home as long as he could, but in June 1940 France surrendered; knowing himself to be proscribed by the Nazis (
Joseph Goebbels denounced him personally), Maugham made his way to England in uncomfortable conditions on a coal freighter from
Nice. Haxton, as a citizen of neutral America, was not in immediate peril from the Germans and remained at the villa, securing it and its contents as far as possible, before making his way via Lisbon to New York.
Second World War Maugham spent most of the war years in the US, based for much of the time at a comfortable house on the estate of his American publisher,
Nelson Doubleday. His lifestyle was modest: he felt that despite his considerable wealth he should not live luxuriously while Britain was enduring wartime privations. As always, Maugham wrote continually. His daily routine was to write between an early breakfast and lunchtime, after which he entertained himself. His most substantial book from the war years was ''The Razor's Edge''; he found writing it unusually tiring – he was seventy when it was completed – and vowed it would be the last long novel he wrote. Haxton was holding down a responsible job in Washington and enjoying his new independence and self-reliance. Maugham was happy for him and was reconciled to the possibility of returning to La Mauresque without him after the war. The possibility became a certainty when in November 1944, after a six-month illness initially diagnosed as
pleurisy, Haxton died of tuberculosis. Maugham was distraught; he told his nephew, Robin, "You'll never know how great a grief this has been to me. The best years of my life – those we spent wandering about the world – are inextricably connected with him. And in one way or another – however indirectly – all I've written during the last twenty years has something to do with him". Even before Haxton's mortal illness, Maugham had already chosen a replacement as secretary-companion, in anticipation that Haxton would not return to live at La Mauresque. This was
Alan Searle, whom Maugham had known since 1928, when Searle was twenty-three. He came from
Bermondsey, a poor district of London. Morgan describes him: Maugham's biographers have differed considerably about Searle's character and his influence for better or worse on his employer. Connon writes, "He was seen by some as a near saint and by others, particularly the Maugham family, as a villain"; Raphael calls him "a man of more reliable stamp" than Haxton;
Post-war and final years Before returning to the south of France after the war, Maugham travelled to England and lived in London until the end of 1946. While there, he established and endowed the
Somerset Maugham Award, to be administered by the
Society of Authors and given annually for a work of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry written by a British subject under the age of thirty-five. After returning to Cap Ferrat he completed his last full-length work of fiction, the historical novel
Catalina. He did the same on American television, introducing the
Somerset Maugham Theater series, which a reviewer said enjoyed "tremendous popularity ... and has won for him an audience of millions of enthusiastic fans". Maugham made many subsequent visits to London, including one for his daughter's second marriage in July 1948, where, in Hastings's words, "with professional ease he acted the part of proud father, managed to be civil to Syrie, and made a creditable speech at the reception at
Claridge's afterwards". During a visit in 1954 he was invested as a
Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) by
the Queen at a private audience in
Buckingham Palace. He was widely understood in literary circles to have turned down a
knighthood and to have hankered after the more prestigious and exclusive British honour, the
Order of Merit, saying to friends that the CH "means 'Well done, but ...'". There is some suggestion that his known homosexuality may have militated against his receiving the higher honour. He kept himself fit, and further attempted to fend off the encroachments of age with supposedly rejuvenating injections at the clinic of
Paul Niehans. Nonetheless, his final years, according to Connon, were marred by increasing senility, misguided legal disputes and a memoir, published in 1962,
Looking Back, in which "he denigrated his late former wife, was dismissive of Haxton, and made a clumsy attempt to deny his homosexuality by claiming he was a red-blooded heterosexual". Maugham died in the Anglo-American Hospital in Nice on the night of 15–16 December 1965 at the age of 91, of complications following a fall. He was cremated in
Marseille on 20 December. Two days later his ashes were interred in the grounds of The King's School, Canterbury, beside the wall of the Maugham Library, which he had endowed in 1961. Morgan observes: ==Works==