William Somerset Maugham(Barry) William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) was one of the most popular English writers, best remembered for books like The Razors Edge, Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence. When I first started reading Maugham, I was particularly drawn to his short stories, which displayed an incredible degree of originality and clever plotting. Perhaps one of the best examples would be the story titled Rain, where two couples are stranded in Pago-Pago due to a measles epidemic. The Davidsons are fervent missionaries determined to convert the local Samoans. The story displays how the husband’s determination to reform a prostitute leads to tragedy.

Maugham once wrote that entertaining readers with a unique and imaginative plot was his primary consideration when creating literary fiction. More recent assessments generally rank Of Human Bondage – a book with a large autobiographical element – as a masterpiece; his short stories are widely held in high critical regard. Maugham earned a small fortune not just from his writings, which were quite popular throughout the English-speaking world, but also due to the fact that many books were later adapted into movies.

Despite his literary fame and wealth, William Somerset Maugham experienced considerable personal hardship and suffering both in his youth and later years. 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.

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 these issues 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.

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“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself
a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”

“Any society that values wealth above freedom will lose
its freedom, and will ultimately lose its wealth as well.”

“All the words I use in my stories can be found in the
dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the
right sentences.”

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately,
no one knows what they are.”

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself
a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”

After a rather miserable childhood and bouncing about from one unfulfilling job to another, Maugham decided to become a physician. He 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 his work as a medical student Maugham met the poorest working-class people: "I was in contact with what I most wanted, life in the raw". In maturity, he recalled the value of his experiences: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief; I saw the dark lines that despair drew on a face." From 1892 until he qualified in 1897, he studied medicine at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School.

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What follows are a number of excerpts from W. S. Maugham’s writings. Some are short and epigrammatic, while others quite lengthy and steeped in worldly wisdom.

“How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and
you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to
you it was only an episode.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who
have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are
full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them,
and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised
and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for
the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the
conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through
a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They
must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they
have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail
driven into the body on the cross of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid
and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with
one than happiness with the other.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by
choosing personality over character.”
― W.Somerset Maugham

“I had no illusions about you,' he said. 'I knew you were silly
and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that
your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I
loved you. I knew that you were second-rate. But I loved you.
It's comic when I think how hard I tried to be amused by the
things that amused you and how anxious I was to hide from
you that I wasn't ignorant and vulgar and scandal-mongering
and stupid. I knew how frightened you were of intelligence and
I did everything I could to make you think me as big a fool as
the rest of the men you knew. I knew that you'd only married me
for convenience. I loved you so much, I didn't care. Most people,
as far as I can see, when they're in love with someone and the
love isn't returned feel that they have a grievance. They grow
angry and bitter. I wasn't like that. I never expected you to love
me, I didn't see any reason that you should. I never thought
myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you
and I was enraptured when now and then I thought you were
pleased with me or when I noticed in your eyes a gleam of
good-humored affection. I tried not to bore you with my love;
I knew I couldn't afford to do that and I was always on the
lookout for the first sign that you were impatient with my
affection. What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared
to receive as a favor.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to
regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which
now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they
paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the
lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful
life. That is the perfect work of art.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than
the things I don't.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil


“Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to
behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you
treat them decently they make you suffer for it.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful
to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize
the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand
unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that
they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they?
When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in
the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not
disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably.
Men seek but one thing in life -- their pleasure.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing
to spend the rest of one's life with her.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God,
some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same
Way and it leads nowhither.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“Only a mediocre person is always at his best.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know
that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a
humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic
part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the
tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world,
the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing
himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not
know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world
which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter
disappointment.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage


In 1897 W.S. Maugham published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, a tale of working-class adultery and its consequences. Maugham drew much of the plot and expository prose 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. The newspaper praised the author's "vividness and knowledge ... extraordinary gift of directness and concentration ... His characters have an astounding amount of vitality".

The Times also recognized 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. Irony of ironies - Maugham qualified as a physician the month after the publication of Liza of Lambeth but 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."

In what most critics consider his greatest work, Of Human Bondage, the hero, Philip Carey, suffers the same childhood misfortunes as Maugham himself: the loss of his mother, the breakup of his family home, and his emotionally straitened upbringing by elderly relatives. In addition, Carey has a club foot, a disability which commentators equate with either Maugham's stammer or his homosexuality.

Maugham proofread Of Human Bondage at Malo-les-Bains, near Dunkirk, during a lull in his ambulance duties during the war. When the book was published in 1915 some of the initial reviews were favorable 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". The tide of opinion was turned by the influential American novelist and critic Theodore Dreiser, who called Maugham a great artist and the book a work of genius, of the utmost importance, comparable to a Beethoven symphony.

In his final years, William Somerset Maugham gradually slid into a state of senile dementia characterized by extreme panic attacks and inability to care for his most basic needs. His final years proved quite tragic and in some ways mirrored his difficult youth. Having said this, nothing takes away from the man’s huge literary accomplishments.


Postscript:
Though I have read all of W.S. Maugham’s novels
and short stories as well as several biographies, the
bulk of what has been set down here was gleaned
from writings gathered off the internet. With that
in mind, I can only consider this essay more a
compilation of other people’s thoughts and
opinions rather than a subjective/personal account
the great English writer.

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