By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ted Morgan. Both Maugham's parents died before he was 10, and the orphaned boy was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. A younger man from the London slum area of Bermondsey, Searle had already been kept, or supported, by older men. During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service. My vision is not so penetrating.”. He concludes his narrative with an account of meeting Rosie, then more than seventy years old, in New York.

Combing his work forced him to consciously mold his writing style, and to make his stories concise without making the monthly story tedious. Maugham became a witty satirist of the post-colonial world and wrote over thirty plays, mainly light satiric comedies. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style. Philip is ill-equipped to cope with passion. W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham” are two self-compiled volumes filled with literary sketches from his travels around the world. With this bleak conclusion, Philip comes to another realization: Like the weaver of the carpet, a person may choose the strands that please his aesthetic sense and make a pattern of his life satisfying to his own taste.

Even the wife he abandoned displays reproductions of his paintings in her home and takes pride in his attainments.

In that period, Maugham began a relationship with Alan Searle, whom he had first met in 1928. He drew upon his experiences as an obstetrician in his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), and its success, though small, encouraged him to abandon medicine. Maugham. Returning from India at the end of the novel, he gives up his independent income and resolves to find work in New York driving a taxi. Quiet and observant, Maugham had a good temperament for intelligence work; he believed he had inherited from his lawyer father a gift for cool judgment and the ability to avoid being deceived by facile appearances. [6] She had Maugham several years after the last of his three elder brothers was born. Maugham responded: "I am not yet too old to learn.

The poet told him that the rug held the key to the meaning of life, but he refused to explain the puzzle to Philip.

During World War I he worked as a secret agent. In The Moon and Sixpence, Charles Strickland represents the true genius whose work survives and speaks to posterity, even though his talent surfaced late in life and he violated accepted standards to advance it. On the other hand, I had an acute power of observation and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed. 1928; The Breadwinner, pr., pb. Cordell, Richard A. Somerset Maugham, a Writer for All Seasons: A Biographical and Critical Study. He continued to be highly productive, writing plays, short stories, novels, essays and travel books. W. Somerset Maugham, in full William Somerset Maugham, (born Jan. 25, 1874, Paris, France—died Dec. 16, 1965, Nice), English novelist, playwright, and short-story writer whose work is characterized by a clear unadorned style, cosmopolitan settings, and a shrewd understanding of human nature. I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed. [33] In September 1915, Maugham began work in Switzerland, as one of the network of British agents who operated against the Berlin Committee, whose members included Virendranath Chattopadhyay, an Indian revolutionary trying to resist colonial Britain's rule of India.

Yet, you notice him! It was his home for most of the rest of his life. [28][29] He considered that the misery and bitterness of the world suggested that God did not exist. The unflattering portrait of Walpole, recognizable to many contemporaries and to Walpole himself, contributed to an attack on Maugham by Evelyn Wiehe in Gin and Bitters (1931), where he is given the name Leverson Hurle. The solution becomes apparent to Philip years later, after much searching for it: Life has no meaning. In 1951, Katherine Cornell was a great success playing the lead in Maugham's comedy The Constant Wife. Maugham himself denied any intention of doing this in a long letter to Walpole:[56] "I certainly never intended Alroy Kear to be a portrait of you. [60] In his novel Misery, Stephen King places a rich collection of Maugham's books in the house where most of the plot is set, and incidentally praises Maugham's mastery of storytelling. Maugham 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. I wish I had, for I might have learnt from it something of the kind of man he was."[5]. The result is that he loses his religious faith, though he assumes that the actual cause of the loss is that he lacks the religious temperament. It is so important for a gentleman’s clothing does not supercede his own presence so that he strays into the foppish realm. Numerous characters in the novel are based upon people the author knew. Kingpin Chic is gentlemenswear. Bibliography With that completed, he was eager to assist the war effort again. [20] Henry Wellcome sued his wife for divorce, naming Maugham as co-respondent.[21]. With the aid of an omniscient narrator, the reader follows the life of Philip Carey from his mother’s death when he was only nine until he becomes a doctor and resolves to marry. He was teased for his bad English (French had been his first language) and his short stature, which he inherited from his father. Liza Kemp’s friend Sally enters marriage with hope, only to find her chances for happiness shattered owing to her husband’s bad temper following drinking bouts, a weakness he had previously concealed. I wonder if that does not make the Christian uneasy to reflect that if he had been in. Morgan, Ted. Thank you very much. Later, he asked that Katharine Cornell play the lead in the 1927 Broadway version. In 1934 the American journalist and radio personality Alexander Woollcott offered Maugham some language advice: "The female implies, and from that the male infers." The novels brought Maugham acclaim and recognition both from a general audience and from the intelligentsia. His uncle tried to find Maugham a new profession. In The Magician, Maugham incorporates the conventions of the gothic genre, though there is perhaps too much realism for this work to be designated a true gothic novel.

All Rights Reserved, How I got Ripped in 2 Years by Following These 13 Principles, School is for Fools: 10 Reasons the Education System is a Failure, My 6-week Experiment with the UltraMind Diet, How to Overcome the Fear of Failure and Develop the Will to Win, The Key to Success is to Be in the Right Business, The Expanded Version of Breaking out of Homeostasis & More, The 13 Minute Workout: How to Maintain Your Physique with Minimal Time Spent, Nothing New Under the Sun: 8 Historic Patterns, 20 Future Skills And My Selection of Expert Advice (from Podcast Guests), Axiom Breakers #1 : Singapour – Audace & Discipline, Worldly Wisdom from Lee Kuan Yew: 9 Lessons You Can Learn from LKY. I am convinced that when I die, I shall cease entirely to live; I shall return to the earth I came from.” — W. Somerset Maugham. Venue: Ms. Madhavi Murthy’s residence. He lived there until his death, with time away for frequent and long travels. This ability is sometimes reflected in Maugham's literary characters. Frequently, his characters grow in tolerance and acceptance of human life, which is portrayed somewhat pessimistically.

The marriage was unhappy, and the couple separated. Maugham’s view of romance in this work is consistent with the view presented in his other works and with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic outlook—that romantic passion is a kind of trick played upon people by nature to foster procreation, that it does not last, that it is irrational, and that it represents a poor basis for marriage. He is made up of a dozen people and the greater part of him is myself"—yet in an introduction written for the 1950 Modern Library edition of the work, he plainly states that Walpole was the inspiration for Kear (while denying that Thomas Hardy was the inspiration for the novelist Driffield).

Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of “lyrical quality”, his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work. Maugham was orphaned at the age of 10; he was brought up by an uncle and educated at King’s School, Canterbury. Notable winners include V. S. Naipaul, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis and Thom Gunn. Yet during all this time he recognized that his one compelling ambition was to be a writer. Maugham was sent back to the UK to be cared for by his paternal uncle, Henry MacDonald Maugham, the Vicar of Whitstable, in Kent. ( Log Out /  The memoir cost him several friends and exposed him to much public ridicule. 1909; Landed Gentry, pr. He had adapted it for the stage from a story published in 1924 in Hearst's International; it was reprinted in his collection The Casuarina Tree (1926).

Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent. Maugham's mother, Edith Mary (née Snell), contracted tuberculosis, a condition for which her physician prescribed childbirth. This theme is commonly found in Maugham’s work. “I have never quite got over my astonishment at being a writer,” he observed years later in The Summing Up (1938). There he hosted one of the great literary and social salons of the 1920s and 30s. The writer's life allowed Maugham to travel and to live in places such as Spain and Capri for the next decade, but his next ten works never came close to rivalling the success of Liza. Some at least of the broad and typical human emotions he can never experience.

The story's themes of Eastern mysticism and war-weariness struck a chord with readers during the Second World War.

He takes pleasure in the solitary pursuit of reading and is less in the company of others than most boys; as a result, he has little understanding of the world at large.

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