In the 30s of the twentieth century, the name of Somerset Maugham was known in all circles of European society. A talented prose writer, a brilliant playwright, a politician and a British intelligence officer... How did all this combine in one person? Who is Maugham Somerset?
Englishman, born in Paris
On January 25, 1874, the future famous writer Somerset Maugham was born on the territory of the British embassy in Paris. His father, who came from a dynasty of lawyers, had planned such an unusual birth in advance. All boys born in France in those years, upon reaching adulthood, had to go to serve in the army and participate in military operations against England. Robert Maugham could not allow his son to fight against the homeland of his ancestors. Born in the British embassy, little Somerset automatically became a British citizen.
Childhood trauma
Somerset Maugham's father and grandfather were confident that the boy would follow in their footsteps and become a lawyer. But fate went against the wishes of the relatives. William lost his parents at an early age. His mother died in 1882 from consumption, and two years later cancer took his father’s life. The boy was taken in by English relatives from Whitstable, a small town located near Canterbury.
Until the age of 10, the boy spoke only French, and it was difficult for him to master his native language. His uncle's family did not become family to William. Henry Maugham, who served as a vicar, and his wife treated their new relative coldly and dryly. did not add mutual understanding. The stress suffered from the early loss of his parents and moving to another country resulted in a stutter, which remained with the writer for the rest of his life.
Studies
In Great Britain, William Maugham studied at the Royal School. Due to his fragile physique, short stature and strong accent, the boy was ridiculed by his classmates and avoided people. Therefore, he accepted admission to the University of Heidelberg in Germany with relief. In addition, the young man took up what he loved - studying literature and philosophy. Medicine became another passion of Maugham. In those years, every self-respecting European man had to have a serious profession. Therefore, in 1892, Maugham entered the London Medical School and became a certified surgeon and general practitioner.
During the First World War
The novelist met the beginning of the First World War by serving in the British Red Cross. He was then recruited by British intelligence MI5. For a year, Maugham carried out reconnaissance missions in Switzerland. In 1917, disguised as an American correspondent, he arrived on a secret mission in Russian Petrograd. Somerset's task was to prevent Russia from leaving the war. Despite the fact that the mission failed, Maugham was pleased with the trip to Petrograd. He fell in love with the streets of this city, discovered the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. For the sake of reading their works, I began to learn Russian.
Between the wars
Since 1919, in search of thrills, Maugham began traveling to the countries of Asia and the Middle East. Visited China, Malaysia, Tahiti. The prose writer drew inspiration from his travels, which led to fruitful work. Over the course of two decades, many novels, plays, short stories, sketches, and essays have been written. As a new direction - a series of socio-psychological dramas. Famous writers often gathered at his villa, purchased in 1928 on the French Riviera. It was visited by H.G. Wells and Winston Churchill. In those years, Maugham was the most successful English writer.
During World War II
The writer met the beginning of this war in France. There he was supposed to monitor the mood of the French and write feature articles about how the country would not give up its military positions. After the defeat of France, Somerset Maugham was forced to leave for the USA. There he lived throughout the Second World War, working on writing scripts for Hollywood. Returning home after the war, the playwright watched with regret the picture of devastation and devastation, but continued to write further.
After the war
In 1947, the Somerset Maugham Prize was approved. It was awarded to the best English writers under 35 years of age. In 1952, Maugham was awarded a doctorate in literature. He no longer traveled and devoted a lot of time to writing essays, preferring them to drama and fiction.
About personal life
Maugham did not hide his bisexuality. He tried to create a traditional family, marrying Siri Welkom in 1917. She was an interior decorator. They had a daughter, Mary Elizabeth. Due to frequent travel in the company of his secretary and lover Gerold Hexton, Somerset was unable to save the marriage. The couple divorced in 1927. Throughout his life, the writer had affairs with both women and men. But after Hexton's death in 1944, the playwright did not experience such warm feelings for anyone.
Departure
William Somerset Maugham passed away at the age of 91 (12/15/1965). The cause of death was pneumonia. The prose writer's ashes were scattered at the walls of the Maugham Library, located at the Royal School in Canterbury.
The beginning of a creative journey
Somerset Maugham's first work was writing a biography of the opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. It was written during my university years. The work was not properly evaluated by the publisher, and young writer burned him in his hearts. But to the delight of future readers, the first failure did not stop the young man.
Somerset Maugham's first serious work was the novel "Lisa of Lambeth". It was written after the author's work at St. Thomas's Hospital and was well received by critics and readers. This made the writer believe in his talent and try himself as a playwright, writing the play “Man of Honor.” The premiere did not create a sensation. Despite this, Maugham continued to write and a few years later became successful as a playwright. The comedy "Lady Frederick", staged at the Court Theater in 1908, earned special love from the public.
Creative Dawn
After the resounding success of "Lady Frederick", the best works of Somerset Maugham began to be born one after another:
- fantasy novel "The Magician", published in 1908;
- "Catalina" (1948) - a mystical novel about a girl who miraculously got rid of a terrible illness, but never became happy;
- "Theater" (1937) - an ironically described story of a middle-aged actress who tries to forget about her age in the arms of a young suitor;
- the novel "The Patterned Veil" (1925) - a beautiful and tragic love story, filmed three times;
- "Mrs. Craddock" (1900) - another life story about the relationship between a man and a woman;
- "The Conqueror of Africa" (1907) - an action-packed novel about love during a journey;
- “Summing Up” (1938) - biography of the author in the form of notes about his work;
- “On the Chinese Screen” (1922) is a story full of Maugham’s impressions from visiting the Chinese Yangtze River;
- "Letter" (1937) - dramatic play;
- "The Sacred Flame" (1928) - a detective drama with a philosophical and psychological meaning;
- "The Faithful Wife" (1926) - a witty comedy about gender inequality;
- "Shappy" (1933) - social drama about a little man in the world of big politics;
- “For Services Rendered” (1932) - a play about the state of society before the threat of fascism and World War II;
- "Villa on the Hill" (1941) - romantic story about the life of a young widow waiting for happiness;
- "Then and Now" (1946) - a historical novel about Italy in the early sixteenth century;
- "A Tight Corner" (1932) - a crime novel containing reflections on Buddhism;
- collections of stories “On the Outskirts of the Empire”, “An Open Opportunity”, “The Trembling of a Leaf”, “Six Stories Written in the First Person”, “Ashenden, or the British Agent”, “A King”, “The Same Mixture”, “Casuarina” ", "Toys of Fate";
- collections of essays “Scattered Thoughts”, “Changable Moods”, “Great Writers and Their Novels”.
Along with major works, the stories of Somerset Maugham were also popular:
- "Unconquered";
- "Something human";
- "The Fall of Edward Burward";
- "The Man with the Scar";
- "Bag with books."
Somerset Maugham. Best essays
Somerset Maugham's novel "The Burden of Human Passions" deserves special attention. It was written in 1915 and is considered autobiographical. The main character of the work goes through many life trials, but, despite everything, he finds his place in life. He was left an orphan early, and his lameness did not add to his happiness. But this did not stop the hero from desperately searching for the meaning of life. As a result, he finds happiness in a simple human life without unnecessary passions. In the 60s, the author removed a significant number of scenes from the novel, presenting to the literary world a new creation by Somerset Maugham, “The Burden of Passions.” The work was filmed three times.
The next work that won the love of readers was the novel “Pies and Beer, or the Skeleton in the Closet,” written in 1930. It is noteworthy that Somerset Maugham borrowed the title of the novel from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The novel is full of sarcasm towards the British literary environment and describes the life of a young talented writer. At the same time, the plot is marked by all manifestations of life - relationships between people, the delusions of youth, the influence of gossip and prejudice on human destiny. One of the novel's heroines is the prototype of a real woman with whom Maugham had a romantic relationship. "Pies and Beer" became the author's favorite work. In the 70s, a TV series was released based on the book.
"The Moon and the Penny" by Somerset Maugham is a novel that has earned worldwide fame. It is a biography of the French painter Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin. For the sake of painting, the main character of the novel dramatically changes his life at the age of 40. He leaves his family, home, and permanent job, despite illness, depression and poverty, and devotes himself entirely to creativity. “The Moon and a Penny” makes you think about whether everyone dares to change their usual way of life in order to achieve a high goal.
Another bestseller from the British novelist is On the Razor's Edge. The novel was published in 1944. It describes the life of different sectors of society between the First and Second World Wars. The author covers a large period of time, forces his characters to make choices, search for the meaning of life, rise and fall. And of course, love. "On the Razor's Edge" is Maugham's only work in which the writer touches deeply philosophical topics.
This is how one of the most controversial English writers appears before readers and critics. A little extravagant, skeptical about some things, a satirist in others, a philosopher in others. But in general, the brilliant, inimitable and one of the most widely read authors of world literature is Somerset Maugham, who gave his fans more than 70 works and 30 plays, many of which were adapted into excellent film adaptations.
Name: Somerset Maugham (William Somerset Maugham)
Age: 91 years old
Activity: writer
Marital status: was divorced
Somerset Maugham: biography
Somerset Maugham was the author of 21 novels, a short story writer and playwright, a critic and socialite who moved in the highest circles of London, New York and Paris. The writer worked in the genre of realism, focusing on the traditions of naturalism, modernism and neo-romanticism.
Childhood and youth
William Somerset Maugham was born on January 25, 1874. The son of a lawyer at the British Embassy in Paris, he spoke French before he mastered English. Somerset was the youngest child in the family. The three brothers were much older, and at the time of their departure to study in England, the boy was left alone in his parents’ house.
Somerset Maugham with his dog He spent a lot of time with his mother and was attached to her. The mother died of tuberculosis when the child was 8 years old. This loss was the greatest shock in Maugham's life. The experiences provoked a speech impediment: Somerset began to stutter. This feature remained with him throughout his life.
The father died when the boy was 10 years old. The family broke up. The older brothers studied to become lawyers at Cambridge, and Somerset was sent under the tutelage of a priest uncle, in whose house he spent his youth.
The child grew up lonely and withdrawn. Children raised in England did not accept him. The French-speaking Maugham's stutter and accent were ridiculed. On this basis, shyness became more and more intense. The boy had no friends. Books became the only outlet for the future writer, who studied at a boarding school.
At the age of 15, Somerset persuaded his uncle to let him go to Germany to study German language. Heidelberg was the place where he first felt free. The young man listened to lectures on philosophy, studied drama and became interested in theater. Somerset's interests concerned creativity, Spinoza, and.
Maugham returned to Britain at the age of 18. He had a sufficient level of education to choose future profession. His uncle directed him towards the path of a clergyman, but Somerset chose to go to London, where in 1892 he became a student at the medical school at St. Thomas's Hospital.
Literature
The study of medicine and the practice of medicine made Somerset not only a certified physician, but also a man who saw through people. Medicine left its mark on the writer’s style. He rarely used metaphors or hyperbole.
The first steps in literature were weak, since among Maugham’s acquaintances there were no people who could guide him on the right path. He translated Ibsen's works in order to study the technique of creating drama, and wrote stories. In 1897, the first novel, “Lisa of Lambeth,” was published.
Analyzing the works of Fielding and Flaubert, the writer also focused on trends that are relevant to our time. He worked hard and fruitfully, gradually becoming one of the most widely read authors. His books sold quickly, generating income for the writer.
Maugham studied people, using their destinies and characters in his work. He believed that the most interesting things are hidden in the everyday. This was confirmed by the novel “Lisa of Lambeth,” in which the influence of creativity was felt.
In the novel "Mrs. Craddock" the author's passion for prose was visible. For the first time he asked questions about life and love. Maugham's plays made him a wealthy man. The premiere of Lady Frederick, which took place in 1907, established him as a playwright.
Maugham adhered to the traditions glorified by the Restoration theater. Comedies were authoritative for him. Maugham's plays are divided into comic, where ideas similar to reflections are voiced, and dramatic, reflecting social problems.
Maugham's work reflected his experience of participating in the First and Second World Wars. The author reflected his vision in the works “For Military Merit” and “On the Edge of the Razor.” During the war years, Maugham was in an autosanitary unit in France, in intelligence, working in Switzerland and in Russia. In the final, he ended up in Scotland, where he was treated for tuberculosis.
The writer traveled a lot, visited different countries in Europe and Asia, Africa and the islands in the Pacific Ocean. This enriched his inner world and gave him impressions that he used in his creativity. The life of Somerset Maugham was eventful and interesting facts.
“The Burden of Human Passions” and the autobiographical work “On Human Slavery” are novels that combine these categories. In the novel “The Moon and a Penny,” Maugham talks about the tragedy of an artist, in “The Veil of Color” - about the fate of a scientist, and in “Theater” - about the everyday life of an actress.
Somerset Maugham's novellas and stories are distinguished by their sharp plots and psychologism. The author keeps the reader in suspense and uses surprise. The presence of the author’s “I” in works is their traditional feature.
Personal life
Critics and biographers have discussed the ambiguity of Maugham's persona. His first biographers spoke of the writer as a man with bad character, a cynic and misogynist, unable to take criticism. An intelligent, ironic and hardworking writer purposefully paved his way to literary heights.
He focused not on intellectuals and aesthetes, but on those for whom his works were relevant. Maugham forbade the publication of personal correspondence after his death. The ban was lifted in 2009. This made some of the nuances of his life clearer.
There were two women in the writer's life. He was very fond of Ethelvina Jones, known as Sue Jones. Her image is used in the novel “Pies and Beer”. The daughter of a popular playwright, Etelvina was a successful 23-year-old actress when she met Maugham. She had just divorced her husband and quickly succumbed to the writer’s advances.
Miss Jones was famous for her easy-going nature and approachability. Maugham did not consider this vicious. At first he did not plan a wedding, but soon changed his mind. The writer’s marriage proposal was refused. The girl was pregnant from someone else.
Somerset Maugham married Siri Maugham, the daughter of a philanthropist known for his charitable work. Siri has already been married. At 22, she married Henry Wellcome, who was 48. The man was the owner of a pharmaceutical corporation.
The family quickly fell apart due to his wife's infidelity with the owner of a chain of London department stores. Maugham met the girl in 1911. Their union produced a daughter, Elizabeth. At that time, Siri was not divorced from Wellcome. The connection with Maugham turned out to be scandalous. The girl attempted suicide because of her ex-husband's demands for divorce.
Maugham acted like a gentleman and married Siri, although his feelings for her quickly disappeared. Soon the couple began to live separately. In 1929, their official divorce took place. Today, Maugham’s bisexuality is no secret to anyone, which is neither confirmed nor denied by his biographers.
The alliance with Gerald Haxton confirmed the writer’s passions. Somerset Maugham was 40, and his companion was 22 years old. For 30 years, Haxton accompanied Maugham as his travel secretary. He drank, gambled, and spent Maugham's money.
The writer used Haxton's acquaintances as prototypes for his works. It is known that Gerald even looked for new partners for Maugham. One of these men was David Posner.
The seventeen-year-old boy met Maugham in 1943, when he was 69 years old. Haxton died of pulmonary edema and was succeeded by Alan Searle, an admirer and new lover of the writer. In 1962, Maugham officially adopted his secretary, depriving his daughter Elizabeth of inheritance rights. But the daughter managed to defend legal rights, and the court declared the adoption invalid.
Death
Somerset Maugham died of pneumonia at the age of 92. This happened on December 15, 1965 in the provincial French town of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, near Nice. Contrary to French laws, the patient who died within the hospital walls was not subjected to an autopsy, but was transported home and an official declaration of death was made the next day.
The writer's relatives and friends said that he had found his final refuge in his beloved villa. The writer does not have a burial place, as he was cremated. Maugham's ashes were scattered near the walls of the library at the Royal School in Canterbury. This establishment bears his name.
Bibliography
- 1897 - "Lisa of Lambeth"
- 1901 - "Hero"
- 1902 - "Mrs. Craddock"
- 1904 - “Carousel”
- 1908 - “The Magician”
- 1915 - “The Burden of Human Passions”
- 1919 - “The Moon and a Penny”
- 1922 - “On a Chinese Screen”
- 1925 - “Patterned cover”
- 1930 - “Pies and Beer, or Skeleton in the Closet”
- 1931 - “Six stories written in the first person”
- 1937 - “Theater”
- 1939 - “Christmas Vacation”
- 1944 - “The Razor’s Edge”
- 1948 - “Catalina”
Quotes
Quotes, aphorisms and sayings of the witty Maugham are relevant today. They comment life situations, people’s perceptions, the author’s position and his attitude towards his own creativity.
“Before writing a new novel, I always re-read Candide, so that later I can unconsciously measure myself by this standard of clarity, grace and wit.”
“I would not go to see my plays at all, neither on the opening night, nor on any other evening, if I did not consider it necessary to test their effect on the public, in order to learn from this how to write them.”
“Dying is a terribly boring and painful task. My advice to you is to avoid anything like that.”
“The funny thing about life is that if you refuse to accept anything but the best, that’s often what you get.”
William Somerset Maugham was born on January 25, 1874 at the British Embassy in Paris. This birth of a child was planned rather than accidental. Because at that time a law was written in France, the essence of which was that all young men born on French territory had to be drafted into the army upon reaching adulthood. Naturally, the very thought that their son, with English blood flowing in his veins, could soon join the ranks of the army that would fight against England frightened the parents and required decisive action. There was only one way to avoid this kind of situation - by giving birth to a child on the territory of the English embassy, which, according to existing laws, was equivalent to birth on the territory of England. William was the fourth child in the family. And from early childhood, he was predicted to have a future as a lawyer, because both his father and grandfather were prominent lawyers, two brothers later became lawyers, and the most successful was the second brother, Frederick Herbert, who later became Lord Chancellor and Peer of England. But, as time has shown, the plans were not destined to come true.
Being born in Paris could not but affect the child. For example, a boy up to the age of eleven spoke only French. And the reason that prompted the child to start learning English was the sudden death of his mother Edith from consumption when he was eight, and his father died two years later. As a result, the boy finds himself in the care of his uncle Henry Maugham, who lived in the city of Whitstable in England, in the county of Kent. My uncle was a parish priest.
This period of life was not happy for little Maugham. My uncle and his wife were very callous, boring and rather stingy people. The boy also faced an acute problem of communicating with his guardians. Not knowing English, he could not establish relationships with new relatives. And, in the end, the result of such ups and downs in the young man’s life was that he began to stutter and Maugham would have this disease for the rest of his life.
William Maugham was sent to study at the Royal School, which was located in Canterbury, an ancient town located southeast of London. And here little William had more reasons for concern and worry than for happiness. He was constantly teased by his peers for his natural short stature and stuttering. English with a distinctive French accent was also a reason ridicule.
Therefore, moving to Germany in 1890 to study atHeidelberg University was an indescribable, indescribable happiness. Here he finally begins to study literature and philosophy, trying with all his might to get rid of his inherent accent. Here he will write his first work - a biography of the composer Meyerbeer. True, this essay will not cause a “storm of applause” from the publisher and Maugham will burn it, but this will be his first conscious attempt at writing.
In 1892, Maugham moved to London and entered medical school. This decision was not caused by a craving and inclination for medicine, but was made only because a young man from a decent family needed to get some more or less decent profession, and his uncle’s pressure also had an influence in this matter. He would subsequently receive a diploma as a physician and surgeon (October 1897), and even work for some time at St. Thomas's Hospital, which was located in one of the poorest areas of London. But the most important thing for him during this period was literature. Even then he clearly understands that this is precisely his calling and at night he begins to write his first creations. On weekends, he visits theaters and the Tivoli music hall, where he will watch all the performances that he could watch from the very back seats.
We will later see the period of life associated with his medical career in his novel “Lisa of Lambeth,” which was published by"Fischer An Win" will be released in 1897. The novel was accepted by both professionals and the general public. The first editions sold out in a matter of weeks, which gave Maugham confidence in the correctness of his choice towards literature rather than medicine.
1898 reveals William Maugham Somerset as a playwright, he writes his first play “Man of Honor”, which will premiere on the stage of a modest theater only five years later. The play did not cause any furor, it was performed only for two evenings, and the reviews from critics were, to put it mildly, terrible. In fairness, it is worth noting that later, a year later, Maugham would remake this play, radically changing the ending. And already in the commercial theater The Avenue Theater will perform the play more than twenty times.
Despite his relatively unsuccessful first experience in drama, within ten years William Somerset Maugham would become a widely known and recognized playwright.
The comedy Lady Frederick, which was staged in 1908 on the Court Theater stage, enjoyed particular success.
A number of plays were also written that raised issues of inequality in society, hypocrisy, and corruption of representatives of different levels of government. These plays were received by society and critics differently - some sharply criticized them, others praised them for their wit and theatricality. However, despite the mixed reviews, it should be noted that on the eve of the First World War, Maugham Somerset became a recognized playwright, performances based on whose works were successfully staged both in England and abroad.
At the beginning of the war, the writer served with the British Red Cross. Subsequently, employees of the well-known British intelligence service MI5 recruit him into their ranks. So the writer becomes an intelligence officer and goes first to Switzerland for a year and then to Russia to carry out a secret mission, the purpose of which was to prevent Russia from leaving the war. He met with such famous political players of the time as A.F. Kerensky, B.V. Savinkov. etc.
Later, S. Maugham would write that this idea was doomed to failure in advance and he turned out to be a poor agent. The first positive aspect of this mission was Maugham’s discovery of Russian literature. In particular, he discovered Dostoevsky F.M., and was especially amazed by the works of Chekhov A.P., even began to learn Russian in order to read Anton Pavlovich in the original; the second moment was Maugham’s writing of a collection of stories “Ashenden or British Agent” (original title “Ashenden or British Agent”), dedicated to espionage themes.
During the period between the two world wars, the writer wrote a lot and also traveled often, which gave him the basis for writing new and new works. Now these are not only novels or plays, but also a number of short stories, sketches, and essays have been written.
A special place in the writer’s work is the autobiographical novel “Burden” human passions"(1915). Writers of that time like Thomas Wolfe and Theodore Dreiser recognized the novel as brilliant.
During the same period of time, Maugham gravitated towards a new direction for him - socio-psychological drama. Examples of such works are “The Unknown” (1920), “For Merit” (1932), “Sheppie” (1933).
When World War II began, Maugham was in France. And it was not by chance that he ended up there, but by order of the Ministry of Information he was supposed to study the mood of the French and visit ships in Toulon. The result of such actions were articles that give the reader complete confidence that France will fight to the end and will survive this confrontation. The same sentiments permeate his book “France at War” (1940). And just three months after the book’s publication, France would surrender, and Maugham would need to urgently leave the country for England, as there were rumors that the Germans had blacklisted his name. From England he travels to the USA, where he arrives until the end of the war.
Returning to France after the war was full of sadness - his house was looted, the country was in complete devastation, but the main positive point was that the hated fascism was not just stopped, but destroyed to the ground and it was possible to live and write further.
It is no coincidence that during this post-war period Somerset Maugham wrote historical novels. In the books “Then and Now” (1946), “Catalina” (1948), the writer talks about power and its influence on people, about rulers and their policies, and pays attention to true patriotism. In these novels we see a new style of writing novels; there is a lot of tragedy in them.
“The Razor's Edge” (1944) is one of the last, if not the last, significant novel of the writer. The novel was definitive in many respects. When Maugham was once asked: “How long did it take him to write this book,” the answer was “All his life.”
In 1947, the writer decides to approve the Somerset Maugham Prize, which should be awarded to the best English writers under the age of 35.
In June 1952, the writer was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at Oxford.
In recent years, the writer has been immersed in writing essays. And the book “Great Writers and Their Novels,” published in 1848. is a clear confirmation of this. In this book the reader meets such characters as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Dickens and Emily Bronte, Fielding and Jane Austen, Stendhal and Balzac, Melville and Flaubert. All these great people accompanied Maugham throughout his long life.
Later, in 1952, his collection Changeable Moods was published, consisting of six essays, where we see memories of such novelists as G. James, G. Wells and A. Bennett, with whom Somerset Maugham was personally acquainted.
On December 15, 1965, the writer passed away. This happened in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat (a city in France). The cause of death was pneumonia. The writer does not have a burial place as such; it was decided to scatter his ashes under the wall of the Maugham Library, at the Royal School in Canterbury.
Biography
William Somerset Maugham (English: William Somerset Maugham [ˈsʌməsɪt mɔːm]; January 25, 1874, Paris - December 16, 1965, Nice) - British writer, one of the most successful prose writers of the 1930s, author of 78 books, British intelligence agent.
William Somerset Maugham was born on January 20, 1874 in Paris in the family of a lawyer. His father served in the British embassy, and the appearance of little Somerset on the territory of the embassy, according to his parents, was supposed to bring him exemption from conscription into the French army, and in case of war, from being sent to the front.
At the age of ten, the boy moved to live in England in the city of Whitstable, Kent County, with relatives due to huge losses. Due to serious illnesses, first the mother dies, then the father. It is not surprising that upon arrival in the UK, little William begins to stutter, and this will remain with him for the rest of his life. However, the family of vicar Henry Maugham paid due attention to the upbringing and education of the child. First studying at the Royal School in Canterbury, then entering the University of Heidelberg to study philosophy and literature.
Here was the first attempt at writing - a biography of the composer Meyerbeer. The work did not suit the publisher, and the upset William burned it.
In 1892, to study medicine, William entered the medical school at St. Thomas in London. Five years later, in his first novel, Lisa of Lambeth, he would talk about this. But the play “Lady Frederick” brought the writer his first real literary success in 1907.
During the First World War, Maugham served in British intelligence, as an agent of which he was sent to Russia, where he remained until the October Revolution. In Petrograd, he repeatedly met with Kerensky, Savinkov and others. The scout's mission failed due to the revolution, but was reflected in the novels. After the war, William Somerset Maugham worked hard and fruitfully in the literary field, plays, novels, and short stories were published. Visits to China and Malaysia brought inspiration to write two collections of short stories.
Another of the most interesting facts in Maugham’s biography is his purchase of a Villa in Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera. It was one of the most magnificent literary and social salons of that time, where there were such celebrities as Winston Churchill and Herbert Wells. Sometimes Soviet writers also visited there. Most of the time, the writer is exclusively occupied with creativity, which brings him worldwide fame and money. He approved the Somerset Maugham Prize. It was given to young English writers.
Second interesting fact: Maugham placed his desk opposite a blank wall. He believed that this way nothing would distract him from his work. And I always worked in the same mode: at least 1000-1500 words per morning.
William Somerset Maugham died on 12/15. 1965 at the age of 91 near Nice from pneumonia.
Somerset Maugham - list of all books
All genres Novel Prose Realism Classic prose Biography
| Year | Name | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 7.97 ( | |
| 1915 | 7.82 (76) | |
| 1937 | 7.80 (67) | |
| 1925 | 7.66 (35) | |
| 1921 | 7.64 ( | |
| 1921 | 7.59 ( | |
| 7.42 ( | ||
| 1925 | 7.42 ( | |
| 1944 | 7.42 (16) | |
| 1943 | 7.42 ( | |
| 1937 | 7.39 ( | |
| 1908 | 7.38 ( | |
| 2011 | 7.38 ( | |
| 1898 | 7.38 ( | |
| 1902 | 7.32 ( | |
| 1939 | 7.31 ( | |
| 1948 | 7.31 ( | |
| 1921 | 7.31 ( | |
| 1925 | 7.31 ( | |
| 1948 | 7.19 ( | |
| 1904 | 7.19 ( | |
| 1930 | 7.15 ( | |
| 1947 | 6.98 ( | |
| 2013 | 6.91 (50) | |
| 1922 | 6.64 ( | |
| 1901 | 6.63 ( | |
| 1921 | 6.61 ( | |
| 0.00 ( | ||
| 0.00 ( |
Roman (35.71%)
Prose (21.43%)
Realism (21.43%)
Classic prose (14.29%)
Biography (7.14%)
For you there is no difference between truth and fiction. You're always playing. This habit is second nature to you. You play when you receive guests. You play in front of the servants, in front of your father, in front of me. In front of me you play the role of a tender, indulgent, famous mother. You don't exist. You are only the countless roles you have played. I often ask myself: were you ever yourself or from the very beginning served only as a means of bringing to life all the characters you portrayed. When you walk into an empty room, I sometimes want to suddenly swell the door there, but I have never dared to do this - I’m afraid that I won’t find anyone there.
Irony is a gift from the gods, the most subtle way of verbally expressing thoughts. This is both armor and weapons; both philosophy and constant entertainment; food for a hungry mind and a drink that quenches the thirst for fun. How much more elegant is it to kill an enemy by pricking him with the thorn of irony than to crush his head with the ax of sarcasm or beat him off with the club of abuse. The master of irony enjoys it only when the true meaning of the statement is known to him alone, and sprinkles it into his sleeve, watching how those around him, shackled by the chains of their stupidity, take his words absolutely seriously. In a harsh world, irony is the only protection for the careless. For the writer, this is a projectile with which he can shoot at the reader in order to refute the vile heresy that he creates books not for himself, but for the subscribers of the Mudie library. Do not be misled, dear reader: a self-respecting author has nothing to do with you.
From the book "Mrs. Craddock" -
I won’t lie, from time to time I allowed myself to have some fun. A man cannot do without this. Women, they are built differently.
From the book “Toys of Fate” -
It seems to me that the world in which we live can be looked at without disgust only because there is beauty that man creates from chaos from time to time. The paintings, the music, the books he writes, the life he manages to live. And most of all beauty lies in a life well lived. This is the highest work of art.
From the book “Patterned Veil” -
Life has no meaning at all. On earth, a satellite of a star rushing into infinity, all living things arose under the influence of certain conditions in which this planet developed; just as life began on it, it can end under the influence of other conditions; Man is just one of the diverse species of this life; he is by no means the crown of the universe, but a product of the environment. Philip remembered a story about an Eastern ruler who wanted to know the whole history of mankind; the sage brought him five hundred volumes; busy with state affairs, the king sent him away, ordering him to present all this in a more concise form; twenty years later the sage returned - the history of mankind now occupied only fifty volumes, but the king was already too old to master so many thick books, and sent the sage away again; Another twenty years passed, and the aged, gray-haired sage brought the lord a single volume containing all the wisdom of the world that he longed to know; but the king was on his deathbed and did not have time left to read even this one book. Then the sage told him the history of mankind in one line, and it read: man is born, suffers and dies. Life has no meaning and human existence is purposeless. But what difference does it make then whether a person was born or not, whether he lives or dies? Life, like death, lost all meaning. Philip rejoiced, as once in his youth - then he rejoiced that he had cast off faith in God from his soul: it seemed to him that he was now freed from all the burden of responsibility and for the first time became completely free. His insignificance became his strength, and he suddenly felt that he could fight the cruel fate that pursued him: for if life is meaningless, the world no longer seems so cruel. It does not matter whether this or that person accomplished anything or failed to accomplish anything. Failure changes nothing, and success is zero. Man is only the smallest grain of sand in a huge human whirlpool that has swept over the earth’s surface for a short moment; but he becomes omnipotent as soon as he unravels the secret that chaos is nothing. Thoughts crowded into Philip's fevered brain, he was choking with joyful excitement. He wanted to sing and dance. He hadn't been this happy in months. “Oh life,” he exclaimed in his soul, “oh life, where is your sting?” The same play of imagination that proved to him, like two and two makes four, that life has no meaning, prompted him to a new discovery: it seems that he finally understood why Cronshaw gave him the Persian carpet. A weaver weaves a pattern on a carpet not for any purpose, but simply to satisfy his aesthetic need, so a person can live his life in the same way; if he believes that he is not free in his actions, let him look at his life as a ready-made pattern that he cannot change. Nobody forces a person to weave the pattern of his life, there is no pressing need for this - he does it only for his own pleasure. From the varied events of life, from deeds, feelings and thoughts, he can weave a pattern - the design will come out strict, intricate, complex or beautiful, and even if it is only an illusion, as if the choice of design depends on himself, even if it is just a fantasy, a pursuit of ghosts in the deceptive light of the moon - that’s not the point; since it seems so to him, therefore, for him it really is so. Knowing that nothing makes sense and nothing matters, a person can still find satisfaction in choosing the various threads that he weaves into the endless fabric of life: after all, it is a river that has no source and flows endlessly, without flowing into any seas . There is one pattern - the simplest, most perfect and beautiful: a person is born, matures, gets married, gives birth to children, works for a piece of bread and dies; but there are other, more intricate and amazing patterns, where there is no place for happiness or the desire for success - perhaps some kind of alarming beauty is hidden in them. Some lives - among them Hayward's - were cut short by blind chance, when the pattern was still far from finished; I could only console myself with the fact that it didn’t matter; other lives, such as Cronshaw's, form such an intricate pattern that it is difficult to understand it - you need to change your perspective, abandon your usual views, in order to understand how such a life justifies itself. Philip believed that by giving up the pursuit of happiness, he was saying goodbye to the last illusion. His life seemed terrible while happiness was the measure, but now that he decided that it could be approached with a different standard, he seemed to have increased strength. Happiness mattered as little as grief. Both of these, along with other small events of his life, were woven into its pattern. For a moment he seemed to rise above the accidents of his existence and felt that neither happiness nor grief could ever influence him as before. Everything that happens to him next will only weave a new thread into the complex pattern of his life, and when the end comes, he will rejoice that the pattern is close to completion. It will be a work of art, and it will not become less beautiful because he alone knows about its existence, and with his death it will disappear. Philip was happy.
Biography
"I was not born a writer, I became one." Sixty-five years is the period of literary activity of the venerable English author: prose writer, playwright, essayist, literary critic Somerset Maugham. Maugham found eternal values that could give meaning to the life of an individual mortal in Beauty and Goodness. Associated by birth and upbringing with the upper middle class, it was this class and its morality that he made the main target of his caustic irony. One of the wealthiest writers of his time, he denounced the power of money over man. Maugham is easy to read, but behind this ease lies painstaking work on style, high professionalism, culture of thought and words. The writer invariably opposed the deliberate complexity of the form, the deliberate obscurity of the expression of thought, especially in those cases when the obscurity “...dresses itself in the clothes of aristocracy.” “The style of a book should be simple enough so that anyone with any education can read it with ease...” - he embodied these recommendations in his own work all his life.
The writer, William Somerset Maugham, was born on January 25, 1874 in Paris. The writer's father was a co-owner of a law firm and a legal attaché at the British Embassy. His mother, a famous beauty, ran a salon that attracted many celebrities from the world of art and politics. In the novel Summing Up, Maugham says about his parents: “She was extremely beautiful woman, and he is an extremely ugly man. I was told that in Paris they were called Beauty and the Beast."
The parents carefully thought through the birth of Maugham. In France, a law was being prepared according to which all young men born in the territory of this country were subject to compulsory conscription into the army upon reaching adulthood. It was impossible to admit the thought that their son, an Englishman by blood, would fight on the side of the French against his compatriots in a couple of decades. This could have been avoided in one way - the birth of a child on the territory of the embassy, which legally means birth on the territory of England.
William was the fourth child in the Somerset family. As a child, the boy spoke only French, but he began to learn English only after he was suddenly orphaned. When Maugham was just eight years old, in February 1882, Maugham's mother died of consumption. And two years later, my father passed away due to stomach cancer. The mother's maid became William's nanny; The boy took the death of his parents very hard.
In the English city of Whitstable, in the county of Kent, lived William's uncle, Henry Maugham, a parish priest, who sheltered the boy. It wasn't the best best time in the life of young Maugham. His uncle turned out to be a rather callous person. It was difficult for the boy to establish relationships with new relatives, because... he did not speak English. Constant stress in the home of Puritan relatives caused William to become ill: he began to stutter, and Maugham retained this throughout his life.
Maugham about himself: “I was small in stature; hardy, but not physically strong; I stuttered, was shy and in poor health. I had no inclination for sports, which occupies such an important place in the life of the English; and - either for one of these reasons, or from birth - I instinctively avoided people, which prevented me from getting along with them."
The Royal School in Canterbury, where William studied, also became a test for young Maugham: he was constantly teased for his poor English and short stature, inherited from his father. The reader can get an idea of these years of his life from two novels - “The Burden of Human Passions” (1915) and “Pies and Beer, or the Skeleton in the Closet” (1929).
Moving to Germany to attend Heidelberg University was for Maugham an escape from the difficult life in Canterbury. At the university, Maugham begins to study literature and philosophy. Here he improves his English. It was at Heidelberg University that Maugham wrote his first work, a biography of the German composer Meerbeer. But the manuscript was rejected by the publisher, and a disappointed Maugham decides to burn it. Maugham was then 17 years old.
At the insistence of his uncle, Somerset returns to England and gets a job as an accountant, but after a month of work the young man quits and goes back to Whitstable. A career in the church sphere was also unattainable for William - due to a speech impediment. Therefore, the future writer decided to devote himself entirely to his studies and his calling - literature.
In 1892, Somerset entered medical school at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. He continued to study and worked at night on his new creations. In 1897, Maugham received a diploma as a physician and surgeon; worked at St. Thomas's Hospital in a poor area of London. The writer reflected this experience in his first novel, “Lisa of Lambeth” (1897). The book was popular among experts and the public, and the first printings sold out within weeks. This was enough to convince Maugham to leave medicine and become a writer.
In 1903, Maugham wrote the first play, “A Man of Honor,” and later five more plays were written—“Lady Frederick” (1907), “Jack Straw” (1908), “Smith” (1909), “Nobility” (1910), “ Loaves and Fishes (1911), which were staged in London and then in New York.
By 1914, Somerset Maugham was already quite a famous person thanks to his plays and novels. The moral and aesthetic criticism of the bourgeois world in almost all of Maugham’s works is a very subtle, caustic and ironic debunking of snobbery, based on a careful selection of characteristic words, gestures, features of the character’s appearance and psychological reactions.
When the First World War began, Maugham served in France as a member of the British Red Cross, in the so-called Literary Ambulance Drivers, a group of 23 famous writers. Employees of the famous British intelligence MI5 decide to use the famous writer and playwright for their own purposes. Maugham agreed to carry out a delicate mission for intelligence, which he later described in his autobiographical notes and in the collection “Ashenden, or the British Agent” (1928). Alfred Hitchcock used several passages from this text in the film The Secret Agent (1936). Maugham was sent to a number of European countries for secret negotiations with the goal of preventing them from leaving the war. For the same purpose, and also with the task of helping the Provisional Government stay in power, he arrived in Russia after February Revolution. Not without a fair amount of self-irony, Maugham, already at the end of his journey, wrote that this mission was thankless and obviously doomed, and he himself was a useless “missionary”.
The special agent's further path lay in the United States. There the writer met a man for whom the writer carried his love throughout his entire life. This man was Frederick Gerald Haxton, an American born in San Francisco but raised in England, who later became his personal secretary and lover. Maugham was bisexual. The writer, Beverly Nicolet, one of his old friends, testifies: "Maugham was not a 'pure' homosexual. He, of course, had affairs with women, and there were no signs of feminine behavior or feminine manners."
Maugham: “Let those who like me accept me as I am, and let the rest not accept me at all.”
Maugham had affairs with famous women - with Violet Hunt, a famous feminist, editor of the magazine "Free Woman"; with Sasha Kropotkin, daughter of Peter Kropotkin, a famous Russian anarchist who was living in exile in London at the time.
But only two women played an important role in Maugham's life. The first was Ethelwyn Jones, daughter of the famous playwright, better known as Sue Jones. Maugham loved her very much. He called her Rosie, and it was under this name that she entered as one of the characters in his novel Pies and Beer. When Maugham met her, she had recently divorced her husband and was already happy with the popular actress. At first he didn’t want to marry her, and when he proposed to her, he was stunned - she refused him. It turned out that Sue was already pregnant by another man, the son of the Earl of Antrim. Soon she married him.
Another woman writer was Cyrie Barnardo Wellcome; her father was widely known for founding a network of shelters for homeless children. Maugham met her in 1911. Sairi already had experience of an unsuccessful family life. After some time, Cyri and Maugham were already inseparable. They had a daughter, whom they named Elizabeth. Sairee's husband found out about her relationship with Maugham and filed for divorce. Sairi attempted suicide, but survived. When Cyrie divorced, Maugham did what he considered the only correct way out of the situation: he married her. Cyri actually loved Maugham, and he quickly lost interest in her. In one of his letters, he wrote: “I married you because I thought that this was the only thing I could do for you and for Elizabeth, to give you happiness and security. I did not marry you because that he loved you so much, and you know it very well.” Soon Maugham and Siri began to live separately. She became a famous interior designer. A few years later, Sayri filed for divorce, and was granted it in 1929.
Maugham: “I have loved many women, but I have never known the bliss of mutual love.”
Throughout all this time, Maugham did not stop writing.
A real breakthrough was the almost autobiographical novel “On Human Slavery” (Russian translation of “The Burden of Human Passions”, 1915), which is considered Maugham’s best work. The original title of the book, "Beauty for Ashes" (a quote from the prophet Isaiah), was previously used by someone and therefore was replaced. “On Human Slavery” is the title of one of the chapters of Spinoza’s Ethics.
The novel initially received unfavorable reviews from critics in both America and England. Only the influential critic and writer, Theodore Dreiser, appreciated the new novel, calling it a work of genius and even comparing it to a Beethoven symphony. This summary catapulted the book to unprecedented heights, and the novel has been in print ever since. The close relationship between the fictional and the non-fictional became Maugham's trademark. A little later, in 1938, he admitted: “Reality and fiction are so mixed up in my work that now, looking back, I can hardly distinguish one from the other.”
In 1916, Maugham traveled to Polynesia to collect material for his future novel The Moon and the Penny (1919), based on the biography of Paul Gauguin. “I found beauty and romance, but I also found something I never expected: a new me.” These travels were to forever establish the writer in the popular imagination as a chronicler of the last days of colonialism in India, Southeast Asia, China and the Pacific.
In 1922, Maugham appeared on Chinese television with his book of 58 mini-stories collected during his 1920 travels through China and Hong Kong.
Somerset Maugham never, even when he was already a recognized master, allowed himself to present to the public a “raw” piece or, for some reason, that did not satisfy him. He strictly followed the realistic principles of composition and character building, which he considered most consistent with the nature of his talent: “The plot that the author tells must be clear and convincing; it must have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the end must flow naturally from the beginning.. . Just like the behavior and speech of a character should follow from his character."
In the twenties, Maugham continued his successful career as a playwright. His plays include "The Circle" (1921) - a satire on society, "Our Best" (1923) - about Americans in Europe, and "The Constant Wife" (1927) - about a wife who takes revenge on her unfaithful husband, and "Sheppie" (1933) – staged in Europe and the USA.
The villa at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera was purchased by Maugham in 1928 and became one of the great literary and social salons, as well as the home for the rest of the writer's life. Winston Churchill and Herbert Wells sometimes visited the writer, and occasionally Soviet writers also came here. His work continued to expand with plays, short stories, novels, essays and travel books. By 1940, Somerset Maugham had already become one of the most famous and wealthy writers in English. fiction. Maugham did not hide the fact that he writes “not for the sake of money, but in order to get rid of the ideas, characters, types that haunt his imagination, but, at the same time, he does not mind at all if creativity provides him, among other things, with the opportunity to write what he wants and to be his own boss."
In 1944, Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge was published. For most of the Second World War, Maugham, who was already over sixty, was in the United States - first in Hollywood, where he worked hard on scripts, making amendments to them, and later in the South.
His longtime collaborator and lover, Gerald Haxton, died in 1944; after which Maugham moved to England and then, in 1946, to his villa in France, where he lived in between frequent and lengthy travel. After losing Haxton, Maugham resumes his intimate relationship with Alan Searle, a kind young man from the slums of London. Maugham first met him back in 1928, when he worked in charitable organization at the hospital. Alan becomes the writer's new secretary. Searle adored Maugham, and William had only warm feelings for him. In 1962, Maugham formally adopted Alan Searle, denying the right of inheritance to his daughter Elizabeth, because he had heard rumors that she was going to limit his rights to the property through the courts, due to his incompetence. Elizabeth, through the court, achieved recognition of her right to inheritance, and Maugham's adoption of Searle became invalid.
In 1947, the writer approved the Somerset Maugham Prize, which was awarded to the best English writers under the age of thirty-five.
Maugham gave up traveling when he felt that it had nothing more to offer him. “I had nowhere to change further. The arrogance of culture flew away from me. I accepted the world as it is. I learned tolerance. I wanted freedom for myself and was ready to provide it to others.” After 1948, Maugham left drama and fiction, writing essays mainly on literary topics.
“An artist has no reason to treat other people condescendingly. He is a fool if he imagines that his knowledge is somehow more important, and a cretin if he does not know how to approach every person as an equal.” This and other similar statements in the book “Summing Up” (1938), later heard in such essayistic-autobiographical works as “A Writer’s Notebook” (1949) and “Points of View” (1958), could infuriate the self-satisfied “priests of the elegant ", boasting of their belonging to the ranks of the chosen and initiated.
The last lifetime publication of Maugham's work, autobiographical notes "A Look into the Past", was published in the fall of 1962 on the pages of the London Sunday Express.
Somerset Maugham died on December 15, 1965, at the age of 92, in the French town of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, near Nice, from pneumonia. According to French law, patients who died in the hospital were supposed to undergo an autopsy, but the writer was taken home, and on December 16 it was officially announced that he had died at home, in his villa, which became his final refuge. The writer does not have a grave as such, since his ashes were scattered under the wall of the Maugham Library, at the Royal School in Canterbury. One might say, this is how he was immortalized, reuniting him forever with his life’s work.
In his best books, which have stood the test of time and ensured his place among the classics of English literature of the 20th century, poses large, universally human and philosophical problems.
Interesting facts from life
* “I would not go to see my plays at all, neither on the opening night, nor on any other evening, if I did not consider it necessary to test their effect on the public, in order to learn from this how to write them.”
* Maugham wrote several one-act plays and sent them to theaters. Some of them were never returned to him; the rest, disappointed in them, he destroyed himself.
* “Before writing a new novel, I always re-read Candide, so that later I can unconsciously measure myself by this standard of clarity, grace and wit.”
* "When the English intelligentsia became interested in Russia, I remembered that Cato began to study Greek at eighty years old, and took up Russian. But by that time, my youthful ardor had diminished: I learned to read Chekhov’s plays, but I didn’t go further than that, and the little that I knew then was long forgotten.”
* Maugham about Russia: “Endless conversations where action was required; hesitation; apathy leading directly to disaster; pompous declarations, insincerity and lethargy that I observed everywhere - all this pushed me away from Russia and the Russians.”
* Four of Maugham's plays were performed in London at the same time; this created his fame. Bernard Partridge's cartoon appeared in Punch, which depicted Shakespeare languishing with envy in front of posters with the writer's name.
* Maugham about the book “The Burden of Human Passions”: “My book is not an autobiography, but an autobiographical novel, where facts are strongly mixed with fiction; the feelings described in it, I experienced myself, but not all the episodes happened as they are told, and they were taken partly not from my life, but from the lives of people well known to me.”
* “For my own pleasure, for entertainment and to satisfy what was felt as an organic need, I built my life according to some plan - with a beginning, middle and end, just as I built a play, a novel out of the people I met here and there or a story."
Writer's Awards
* Order of the Knights of Honor - 1954
Bibliography
Novels:
* Lisa of Lambeth (1897)
* Magician (1908)
* The Burden of Human Passions (1915)
* Moon and Penny (1919)
* Trembling Leaf (1921)
* On a Chinese screen (1922)
* Patterned Veil (Painted Veil) (1925)
* Casuarina (1926)
* Ashenden, or the British Agent (1928) Collection of short stories
* Gingerbread and Ale (Pies and Beer, or Skeleton in the Closet) (1930)
* Tight Corner (Small Corner) (1932)
* Theater (1937)
* Summing Up (1938)
* Christmas Vacation (1939)
* Same recipe (1940)
* At the Villa (Villa on the Hill, At the Upper Villa) (1941)
* Razor's Edge (1944)
* Then and Now (1946)
* Toys of Fate (1947)
* Catalina (1948)
* Mrs Craddock
Plays:
* A Man of Honor [A Decent Man] (1898)
* Researcher
* Lady Frederick (1907)
* Jack Straw (Jack Straw) (1908)
* Smith (1909)
* Mrs. Dot
* Penelope
* Nobility (1910)
* Loaves and Fishes (1911)
* Those Above Us (1915)
* Circle (1921)
* The Faithful Wife (1927)
* Landowners
* Tenth person
* Promised Land
* Sheppey (1933)
* Sacred Fire (1933)
Novels:
* Ashenden, or the British Agent (1928)
* In lion's skin
Novels, stories:
* Drop of native blood
* Force of circumstances
*Going to visit
* Spell
* Consul
* Taipan
* Casuarina
* Pacific Ocean
* On a Chinese screen
* Backwater
* Leaf flutter
* Vessel of Wrath
* Gigolo and gigoletta
* Rain
* Exactly a dozen
* Something human
* Hairless Mexican
* Mr. Harrington's underwear
*God's judgment
* Marriage of convenience
* Appearance and reality
* Having tasted nirvana
* Return
* Honolulu
*Note
* Source of inspiration
* End of the world
* Louise
* Mackintosh
* Mr. Know-It-All
* Mayhew
* On the outskirts of the empire
* Unconquered
* Beggar
*The Fall of Edward Barnard
* Poet
* Ginger
* Salvatore
* Sanatorium
* Vessel of Wrath
* Dragonfly and ant
* Ant and grasshopper
* Bag with books
*Church minister
* The Man with the Scar
* Sense of decency
* Carousel
Essay
* Summing up (1938, Russian translation 1957)
* A Writer's Notebook (1949)
* Ten Novelists and Their Novels (1954)
* Points of View (1958)
* Hindsight (1962)
Screen adaptations of works, theatrical performances
* The Painted Veil (1934) (2006)
* Theater (1978) (2004)
* In the villa (2000)
* Change of fate (1987)
* Razor's Edge (1984)
* Overnight Sensation (1983)
* Gigolo and Gigoletta (TV) (1980)
* True stories (TV series) (1979–1988)
* The Burden of Human Passions (1934) (1946) (1964)
* Charming Julia (1962)
* The Seventh Sin (1957)
* Miss Sadie Thompson (1953)
* Night Theater (TV series) (1950–1959)
* Trio (1950)
* On the Edge of the Blade (1946)
* Christmas Vacation (1944)
* The Moon and the Sixpence (1942)
* Letter (1929) (1940)
* Too Many Husbands (1940)
* Vessel of Wrath (1938)
* A New Dawn (1937)
* Secret Agent (1936)
* Rain (1932)
* Sadie Thompson (1928)
* East of Suez (1925)
Biography
English writer. Born January 25, 1874 in Paris. His father was co-owner of a law firm there and legal attaché at the British Embassy. His mother, a famous beauty, ran a salon that attracted many celebrities from the world of art and politics. At the age of ten, the boy was orphaned and he was sent to England, to his uncle, a priest. Eighteen-year-old Maugham spent a year in Germany, a few months after his return he entered the medical school at St. Thomas. In 1897 he received a diploma in general medicine and surgery, but never practiced medicine: while still a student, he published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), which absorbed impressions from student practice in this area of London slums. The book was well received, and Maugham decided to become a writer.
For ten years his success as a prose writer was very modest, but after 1908 he began to gain fame: his four plays - Jack Straw (1908), Smith (Smith, 1909), Landed Gentry (1910), Bread and fishes (Loaves and Fishes, 1911) – were staged in London and then in New York. Since the beginning of the First World War, Maugham served in the sanitary unit. Later he was transferred to the intelligence service, he visited France, Italy, Russia, as well as America and the islands of the South Pacific. The work of a secret agent was vividly reflected in his collection of short stories Ashenden, or the British Agent (1928). After the war, Maugham continued to travel widely. Maugham died in Nice (France) on December 16, 1965. A prolific writer, Somerset Maugham created 25 plays, 21 novels and more than 100 short stories, but none literary genre he was not an innovator.
His famous comedies, such as The Circle (1921), The Constant Wife (1927), do not deviate from the canons of the English “well-made play.” In literary prose, be it large or small, he sought to present the plot and strongly disapproved of the sociological or any other orientation of the novel. Maugham's best novels are the largely autobiographical Of Human Bondage and Cakes and Ale (1930); exotic The Moon and Sixpence (1919), inspired by the fate of the French artist P. Gauguin; the story of the southern seas The Narrow Corner, 1932; The Razor's Edge, 1944). After 1948, Maugham left drama and fiction, writing essays, mainly on literary topics. The rapid intrigue, brilliant style and masterful composition of the story brought him the fame of the “English Maupassant.”
WILLIAM SOMERSET MAWHAM: THE EDGE OF TALENT (G. E. Ionkis, (Maugham W. S. Summing up. - M., 1991. - P. 7-25))
“The greatest advantage of old age is spiritual freedom,” Maugham wrote on his seventieth birthday. Fate decreed that he could enjoy this advantage for quite a long time. Looking back over the ninety years he had lived, Maugham came to the conclusion that he had always lived for the future. He could not free himself from this habit even when the future took on the shape of non-existence for him.
The creative longevity of the English writer is impressive: having begun his journey at the time of the growing fame of the late Victorians - T. Hardy, R. Kipling, O. Wilde, he ended it when the “angry ones” had raged and new stars lit up on the literary horizon - W. Golding and A. . Murdoch, J. Fowles and M. Spark.
What is striking is not the length of the sentence allotted to him, but the fact that at every turn of rapidly changing historical time, starting from the 90s of the past and ending with the 50s this century, Maugham the artist remained remarkably modern.
The answer to this phenomenon should be sought first of all in the fact that in his best works Maugham raised great problems of a universal and general philosophical nature, as well as in his amazing sensitivity to the tragic beginning, so characteristic of life in the 20th century, to the hidden drama of characters and human relationships. It is strange that at the same time he was most often reproached for dispassion, coldness of heart, and even cynicism. He, following the idol of his youth, Maupassant, could say: “I am, without a doubt, considered one of the most indifferent people in the world. I am a skeptic, this is not the same thing, a skeptic, because I have good eyes. the eyes tell my heart: hide, old man, you’re funny. And the heart hides.”
It is difficult to dispel the prevailing misconception, but without abandoning bias, one cannot understand the artist. Maugham was not indifferent to people: neither when he chose medicine as his profession, nor when he abandoned it for the sake of writing. Of all his interests and inclinations, the most enduring was his interest in people. “You can write about a person all your life and still say negligible little,” Maugham never tired of repeating. Traveling around the world, he was not so much fascinated by the sights as he was looking for interesting, original people. “What was good in people made me happy; what was bad in them did not lead me to despair,” Maugham admitted. He put his opinion about the human race into the mouth of the hero of one of the stories: “People’s hearts are right, but their heads are no good.” Is Maugham wrong? Object, argue with him. He's honest, and that's what's important.
Now Maugham is recognized in the world as the most widely read English writer after Dickens. However, in English literature courses and the solid academic works of his compatriots, Maugham's work is not given the attention it deserves. He often secretly polemicized against academic literary criticism, and his references to “groups,” “cliques,” and “elites” only strengthened his position as an outsider. Moreover, the unprecedented commercial success clearly damaged his reputation in academic literary circles. The four million he earned with his pen created an invisible wall between him and his fellow craftsmen.
Maugham was painfully worried that the “intelligentsia” (in retaliation, he put this word in quotation marks, meaning “highbrow” intellectuals) did not take him seriously. He was irritated by unfair accusations of pandering to the general public. He did not adapt to anyone; he always had a desire for independence.
At one time, Dreiser promised him a great future. However, the title of Great Businessman of English Literature also came with creative losses. They were pointed out not only by ill-wishers, but also by loyal admirers like Thomas Wolfe. Maugham himself, in his declining years, experienced a bitter feeling that the great contemporaries whom he had outlived had passed him by. Not envying their glory, but jealously looking at other people's achievements, objectively assessing them, he was sometimes annoyed with himself.
We find interesting evidence on this score from Yuri Nagibin, perhaps the only Soviet writer who was lucky enough to be received at the Morisco villa on the Riviera, where Maugham spent a good half of his life and where he died completely alone. "Morisco", where celebrities, princes of the blood and prominent political figures visited (Maugham was friends with Churchill), is part of the legend about the writer. The villa was his fortress, but he did not take refuge in it for long. Maugham was not one of the writers who observed life from a window.
Nagibin was quite struck by the dandyism of the ninety-year-old man, but even more by the contrast between his physical frailty and the strength and liveliness of his thoughts. The Russian guest marveled at the rare combination of calm dignity, childish excitement and poisonous sarcasm with which Maugham spoke about the writing that still worried him. The late Jean Giraudoux was mentioned in the conversation. “I’m angry with him, I can’t forgive that he wrote “Electra” and not me,” said Maugham. “The play about the Trojan War is even better, but I don’t envy - I can’t write something like that. (...) And “I could have written Electra, but I wrote it to Giraudoux, leaving me without a better play.” This unexpected outbreak speaks of high demands on oneself and an understanding of the limits of one’s capabilities. One can argue about Maugham's place in literature, but one thing is certain: writing was the only activity in which he believed infinitely and completely. Devoting himself entirely to literature, he became a true Master.
Maugham consistently and methodically erected the building of his success, guided by a strictly thought-out plan. He easily and freely moved from one literary type and genre to another, achieving perfection in each. The case is unique if we recall Shaw’s experiments in the field of the novel and Flaubert’s equally unsuccessful attempts in drama. Twenty novels, about three dozen plays, many collections of stories, travel and autobiographical books, critical essays, articles, prefaces - this is the result of this life.
William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 into the family of a successful hereditary lawyer, who at that time served in the English embassy in Paris. An Englishman born in France who spoke predominantly French until the age of ten—isn’t this a paradox? There will be many of them in his life. Maugham graduated from primary school in France, and his classmates will make fun of his English for a long time when he finds himself on the other side of the English Channel. It is not surprising that he will never feel completely at home in England. “I was embarrassed by the English” is the confession of an adult.
Childhood impressions determine a lot in life. The French childhood of Maugham, the youngest in the family, passed in an atmosphere of goodwill, affectionate care and tender love emanating from his mother. He was eight years old when she died.
At the age of ten, Maugham lost his father and was given to the care of his uncle. The fifty-year-old vicar was indifferent to his nephew. In his house, the boy acutely felt loneliness. It did not dissipate in any elementary school at Canterbury, where three dismal years passed, nor at King's School, where he continued his education. Little Maugham stuttered badly, which became the reason for endless ridicule from his peers and dull irritation from his teachers. Over time, the teenager got used to his situation, stopped being burdened by loneliness, and even began to look for it. He became addicted to reading, secretly raiding the bookcases in the vicar's office.
The health condition of his nephew, who grew up as a sickly child, forced the guardian to send Willy first to the south of France, and then to Germany, to Heidelberg. This trip determined a lot in the life and views of the young man. The University of Heidelberg at that time was a hotbed of culture and free thought. Cuno Fischer ignited minds with lectures on Descartes, Spinoza, Schopenhauer; Wagner's music shocked, his theory of musical drama opened up unknown distances, Ibsen's plays, translated into German and staged on stage, excited and broke established ideas.
Already at the university he felt his calling, but in a respectable family the position of a professional writer was considered dubious. His three older brothers were already lawyers. Maugham decides to become a doctor. In the autumn of 1892, the eighteen-year-old young man returned to England and entered medical school at St. Thomas in Lambeth - the poorest area of London. Maugham later recalled: “During the years that I was practicing medicine, I systematically studied English, French, Italian and Latin literature. I read many books on history, some on philosophy and, of course, on natural science and medicine.”
Medical practice, which began in his third year, unexpectedly fascinated him. Three years of hard work in hospital wards helped Maugham understand human nature much deeper than the mountains of books he read - he made a clear conclusion: “I don’t know a better school for a writer than the work of a doctor.”
In 1897, his first novel, Lisa of Lambeth, was published. The novel told about the world of the London slums, where George Gissing, the author of the novels “Declassed” (1884) and “Underworld” (1889), was the first to look into the life of the bottom from the inside. When Gissing, who was suffering from tuberculosis, was talking about a rising literary star, he invariably asked the question: “Has he ever starved?” Maugham, having no reason to answer in the affirmative, seemed unable to count on success. Nevertheless, there was success, and criticism immediately ranked the young author as a member of the school of naturalism. But this was only partly true.
Naturalism, as well as aestheticism, the opposing artistic movements of the end of the century, were not very attractive to Maugham. True, Wilde admired him, and his worship of the “apostle of aestheticism” determined much in Maugham’s personal life. As an artist, he was free both from an aesthetic disdain for the prose of life and from a naturalistic relish for the dullness of everyday life.
Maugham drew from many sources, being widely read in philosophy, from Plato to modern thinkers like the neo-Hegelian Bradley and the Platonist Whitehead. Maugham's worldview has always been eclectic. It was formed at a time of widespread dissemination of newfangled idealistic concepts - Nietzscheanism, Bergsonianism. Maugham treated them, as well as Freudianism, with skepticism, while his “highbrow” contemporaries smoked incense for their new idols. Maugham initially trusted the classics more - Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Spinoza. True, he too paid a tribute to the times, succumbing in his youth to the pessimistic teachings of Schopenhauer, who imagined man as an insignificant grain of sand in the ocean. At the same time, young Maugham was carried away by the “scientific” nature of his empiricism, the doctrines of the positivists and pragmatic ethics. “Fundamental Principles,” Spencer’s classic of positivism, became his reference book for some time. His interest in positivism brought him closer to the school of “new realism.” As for artistic references, the great French realists of the 19th century were the beacons of the aspiring writer, and Maupassant was his main teacher.
“When I started working on Lisa of Lambeth, I tried to write it the way, in my opinion, Maupassant should have done it,” he later admitted. However, the book was not born under the influence literary images, but from living impressions. Maugham tried to reproduce with maximum accuracy the life and customs of Lambeth, into whose sinister corners not every policeman dared to look; The obstetrician's black suitcase served as Maugham's pass and safe conduct.
The appearance of Maugham's novel was preceded by a loud scandal caused by T. Hardy's novel "Jude the Imperceptible" (1896). The indignant ardor of critics who accused Hardy of naturalism was thoroughly spent, and Maugham's debut was relatively calm. Moreover, the tragic story of the girl, told with stern truthfulness, without a hint of sentimentality, was a success. And yet, the greatest success awaited the aspiring writer in a different field - the theatrical field.
In less than ten years, Maugham became a famous playwright. His first one-act plays were rejected. In 1902, one of them - “Marriages are made in heaven” - was staged in Berlin. It never got around to being staged in England, although Maugham published the play in the small magazine "Adventure".
The beginning of great success was laid by the comedy "Lady Frederic" (1903), which was staged in 1907 by Court-Tietre. During the 1908 season, four of Maugham's plays were performed in London. Along with entertaining comedies, Maugham also created sharply critical plays in the pre-war years: “The Cream of Society”, “Smith”, “The Promised Land”, in which themes were raised social inequality, hypocrisy and corruption of representatives of the highest echelons of power.
Maugham recalls that the reaction to his plays was mixed: “Public newspapers praised the plays for their wit, gaiety and stage presence, but scolded them for their cynicism; more serious critics were merciless towards them. They called them cheap, vulgar, told me that I had sold my soul Mammon. And the intelligentsia, who had previously counted me among their humble but respected member, not only turned away from me, which would have been bad enough, but cast me into the abyss of hell as a new Lucifer.”
On the eve of the First World War, his plays were successfully performed both in London theaters and overseas.
The war, which split the picture of time in two, also changed the course of Maugham’s life. No, everyday life at the front was never revealed to him. Unlike his compatriots, the young poets and prose writers R. Aldington, R. Graves, Z. Sassoon, he was not in the line of fire. He was briefly in a medical battalion and then joined British Intelligence. Carrying out her assignments, he worked in Switzerland for a year, and then was sent on a secret mission to Russia. At first, Maugham perceived this kind of activity, like Kipling's Kim, as participation in " big game", but later, talking about it (collection "Ashenden, or the British Agent", 1928), he was the first to call espionage not only dirty, but also boring work and dispel the aura of false romance around the activities of the Intelligence Service.
The purpose of his stay in Petrograd, where he arrived in August 1917 through Vladivostok, was to prevent Russia from leaving the war. Meetings with Kerensky deeply disappointed Maugham. The Russian prime minister impressed him as an insignificant and indecisive person. Of all the political figures in Russia with whom he had the opportunity to talk, he singled out Savinkov as a large, outstanding personality. Having received a secret assignment from Kerensky to Lloyd George, Maugham left for London on October 18, not expecting that exactly a week later a revolution would break out and his mission would lose any meaning. Not at all regretting his fiasco, subsequently making fun of the fate of the unsuccessful agent, Maugham was grateful to fate for the “Russian adventure.”
Russia has long attracted him as a writer. He discovered Russian literature as a child when he came across Anna Karenina. Re-reading the novel later, he found it filled with inexplicable power, but somewhat heavy. “Fathers and Sons” remained misunderstood due to ignorance of the Russian historical situation. In general, Turgenev's novels did not touch him deeply; their idealism seemed sentimental, and the originality of the stylistic manner was lost in translation. "Crime and Punishment" shocked Maugham, and he greedily attacked Dostoevsky's novels. He recalled that in comparison with them everything else faded, the greatest Western European novels began to seem artificial, cold, and formal. The “madness” lasted until he discovered Chekhov, who turned out to be deeply related to him in spirit. The impression was so deep that he even began to study Russian in order to read Chekhov in the original. “Chekhov will tell you more about Russians than Dostoevsky,” he later wrote.
The years between the two world wars were filled with intense writing and travel (not counting two years spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium), which gave him inexhaustible material for creativity. He performs in several genres at once: as a novelist, playwright, short story writer, feature writer, essayist. His comedies and dramas compete on stage with the plays of B. Shaw.
Maugham had true "stage instinct." Plays came to him with amazing ease. They are full of winning roles, originally constructed, the dialogue in them is sharp and witty.
In the post-war period, significant changes occurred in Maugham's dramaturgy. Without losing his graceful lightness and dynamism, his comedies acquire greater poignancy. The comedy "The Circle" (1921) sharply criticized immorality high society. Still paying great attention to the plot, but at the same time abandoning the intricacy of plot moves, Maugham limits the action to the framework of one family. Betrayal, calculation, hypocrisy, lack of deep feelings and responsibility towards children, inability to be happy and give happiness to another - this is what Maugham blames his heroes for, whose lives pass as if in a bad cycle, where children repeat the sad fate of their parents.
Maugham is increasingly drawn to psychological drama, acting in it not as a skeptical observer, but as a caring judge who prefers exposure from the inside to open invective. He was one of the first to touch upon the tragedy of the “lost generation” (“The Unknown”, 1920). The hero of the play is a front-line soldier. The cruelty and senselessness of the war turned him into an apostate. He comes into conflict with his family, his fiancée, and the inhabitants of his hometown. The play gradually reveals the criminal alliance of the sword and the cross.
The atmosphere of the “roaring thirties” - a deep economic crisis, the growing threat of fascism and a new world war - determined the social sound of his last plays “For Special Merit” (1932) and “Sheppie” (1933). The anti-war play "On Special Merit" is a bitter commentary on the social condition that Maugham characterized as "the chaos of the post-war world."
The feeling of bitter disappointment defines the sound of the morality play Sheppey. She puzzled critics. The old Maugham was only reminiscent of farcical situations and aphoristic, polished dialogues and monologues. The playwright raised the question of the place and responsibility of a small person in a world of great political and financial passions. He approached in his own way the problem that worried the great stage innovator B. Brecht at that time. The play's situation has something in common with the plot of The Good Man of Szechwan; the use of fantastic grotesquery also brings them together.
In the early thirties, Maugham left dramaturgy; he voluntarily left the “conveyor belt of success.”
Speaking about his desire for excellence, Maugham named two genres in which he hoped to achieve it - the novel and the short story. His literary reputation rests on such novels as The Burden of Human Passions (1915), The Moon and Pennies (1919), and Pies and Beer, or Skeleton in the Closet (1930). Their film adaptation adds to the writer's fame.
His novels are based on a tightly constructed plot, all parts of which are proportionate. Their distinctive features are brevity (the only exception is “The Burden of Human Passions”) and simplicity. They are written without affectation; they do not contain fancy constructions, fanciful comparisons or epithets. The playwright's experience allowed him to appreciate the advantages of rapid plot development and make the novel lively and dynamic. This is precisely the secret of the entertaining nature of Maugham's prose.
The autobiographical novel "The Burden of Human Passions" is recognized as the writer's highest achievement. Written in line with the traditional “novel of education,” it is distinguished by its amazing openness and extreme sincerity in revealing the drama of the soul, and this is where its rare power lies.
Dreiser was delighted with the novel. He called Maugham a “great artist” and the book a “work of genius,” comparing it to a Beethoven symphony. There really is a certain gloomy, irresistible force in her. It does not come from the hero, who is physically rather weak, mentally naked and vulnerable. It is born from a feeling of the slow cycle of existence, the deep flow of life that captivates the hero, what the ancients called fate.
Thomas Wolfe considered The Burden of Human Passion to be one of the best novels of our time, believing that “this book was born straight from the inside, from the depths of personal experience.” The art of a great artist consists of the ability to raise the personal to the universal.
The nature of creativity and its secrets constantly occupied Maugham. In art he saw a special world, opposed to bourgeois everyday life and decent vulgarity. He was interested in what the connection was between the morality of the creator and the fruits of his activity, between genius and villainy. Maugham was not entirely sure that these were “two incompatible things,” as Pushkin believed. These problems form the ideological core of his most popular novel, “The Moon and a Penny.” In the story of Charles Strickland you can find out the facts of Gauguin's biography, but this is not a biography of the famous French post-impressionist, but a novel about tragic fate genius artist, about the inexplicable secret of his personality. Perhaps the veil of mystery will become a little more transparent if we consider that Mozm returns the word “genius” to its original meaning - “demon”, i.e. divine power, evil or (less often) beneficent, determining the fate of a person.
The writer has repeated more than once that the significance of a work of art depends on the scale of the personality of its creator. “The greater his talent, the more clearly expressed his individuality, the more fantastic the picture of life he painted.” The artist's personality is realized in his art, and it is judged by it.
The further development of Maugham as a novelist is increasingly connected with the understanding of ethical problems. In the novel “The Patterned Veil” (1925) he talks about the indispensable unity of Good and Beauty.
The heroine of the novel, the wife of a modest, talented bacteriologist, finding herself with him in a Chinese town lost in the jungle, receives from the French nuns nursing sick Chinese children, and to a certain extent from her husband, who saved others and died from cholera, a lesson in a life well lived. At a high price, she comes to realize the worthlessness of her own life line. The science of compassion and mercy is not easy, but only it leads the heroine to liberation from the “burden of human passions”, to moral purification and rebirth.
In the novel “Pies and Beer, or Skeleton in the Closet,” Maugham’s talent was revealed from an unexpected side: the tragic beginning gave way to the comic, and the satirical line was intricately intertwined with the lyrical one. This is a novel about the mores of literary London on turn of XIX-XX centuries In it, Maugham revealed the secrets of literary cuisine, ways of attracting reader attention, and ridiculed the technology of creating inflated reputations. His fellow writers were shocked by the frankness of his denunciations. For several months, literary circles in London were talking only about this book. Elroy Cyrus was easily recognized as a poisonous portrait of the then popular fiction writer, Maugham's friend Hugh Walpole. The prototype was beside himself with rage. But it was not this fact that outraged the literary world. At that time people were accustomed to this form of polemics, criticism and settling scores. The scandals caused by Aldington's Death of a Hero, Chrome Yellow (1922) and Counterpoint (1928) by O. Huxley, in the parodic images of which both T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence recognized themselves, have not yet been forgotten. and Ezra Pound, and G. Wells, and N. Douglas. But Maugham encroached on the holy of holies: in Driffield they saw a resemblance to the recently deceased Thomas Hardy. Accusations rained down from all sides. Maugham categorically denied any malicious intent: “I meant Hardy no more than George Meredith or Anatole France.” Obviously, the pompous funeral of the “last Victorian” suggested to Maugham the very idea of the novel, but it was not his intention to disturb the shadow of the patriarch of literature.
Maugham loved this novel more than others, because it is autobiographical, but unlike “The Burden of Human Passions” it is filled not with bitterness, but with light sadness. The book turned out to be mischievous and prickly.
The ironic beginning, so characteristic of Pies and Beer, is intensified in the novel Theater (1937). The novel centers on a career story great actress Julia Lambert. Over the thirty years devoted to drama, Maugham got to know many outstanding theater and film actresses. Bette Davis, Corinna Griffiths, Greta Garbo, Gloria Swenson, Gladys Cooper played in films based on his novels. Julia Lambert is a collective image.
During Maugham’s time, a debate continued in theatrical circles, which began with Diderot’s treatise “The Paradox of the Actor”: sensitivity, emotionality or a cold mind makes an actor great; should an actor be a great individual or a blind executor of the director’s will? A supporter of Diderot, Maugham believed that only a rational, observant, outward-looking actor is capable of absorbing, evaluating and re-creating reality into art. At the same time, he did not deny the personal principle. He believed that passions that the actor does not experience himself, but observes from the side, will remain speculatively not comprehended by him to the end and in all depth.
Maugham the artist admires the great art of his heroine, but he does not hide the fact that she continues to play off stage, changing masks, actively participating in the creation of the myth of the incomparable Julia Lambert. It exposes the underside of the myth, the mechanism of its creation, and the craft of an actor itself appears as hard work multiplied by talent; it is deprived of a romantic aura.
Maugham has the Shakespearean perception of the world as a gigantic theater to the highest degree. His novel tells not only about acting as a great art, but also about the acting that is performed in modern relationships between mother and son, husband and wife, about a farce in which the pillars of society, representatives of the intellectual elite, and the powers that be, participate. Everyone plays their own game. Maugham looks at her not from the stalls, but from behind the scenes. A shift in perspective destroys the illusion, revealing hidden motives that guide the actions of the characters.
Maugham turned seriously to the short story genre, being already a famous playwright and novelist.
His first collection, “The Trembling of the Leaf,” appeared in 1921, at a time when the short story genre gained popularity. In England, the story appeared rather late, but the reader immediately fell in love with it. These were the works of Kipling, Conan Doyle and Wells in the first place. In the 1920s, professional storytellers were K. Mansfield and A. Coppard. D.H. Lawrence, R. Aldington, O. Huxley showed interest in the story. The best short story writers of that time were influenced by Chekhov. Highly appreciating his psychologism and ability to convey atmosphere, Maugham gravitated more toward the Maupassant school. “I wanted to build my stories firmly, on one continuous line from exposition to ending... I was not afraid of what is commonly called the “highlight”... I preferred to end my stories not with an ellipsis, but with a period.” This confession by Maugham sheds light on the poetics of his stories. True, over time he turned to Chekhov’s lessons. Combining action with subtle psychologism, he reached significant heights. Over fifty years, Maugham wrote over a hundred stories, comprising seven collections. Among them there are real masterpieces: “Rain”, “The Hairless Mexican”, “Invictus”.
Maugham writes mainly about ordinary people, but extraordinary things happen to them. He makes extensive use of the element of the unexpected, which helps to reveal the fragility and relativity of socio-political values, psychological attitudes, and moral guidelines of a “decent” middle-class person.
An example of this is the now textbook story “Rain,” in which he exposes religious hypocrisy and the spiritual emptiness hidden behind it.
Over the course of his long life, Maugham observed many grimaces of chance and the ridicule of fate, and he told about them in his stories. He didn’t invent stories, he spied them from life. Maugham's strength is in understanding the complexity of man, leading to the unpredictability of his actions, in the depth of comprehension of the dialectics of the soul.
The inevitable fragmentation of impressions in short stories is compensated by Maugham’s unity of view of the world. The impression from his best stories is such that the space remaining outside the boundaries of the plot appears illuminated. The general in his short stories looks through the particular.
Maugham's stories are entertaining and lively, dramatic, and often have a twist ending. Simple in form, extremely concise, devoid of pretensions to formal novelty, they conceal a strange charm, giving rise to a “harmony of authenticity.” Maugham is classic, his stories are characterized by completeness of form, his speech flows without fuss, and his novelty is rather in the point of view from which his heroes are revealed to him, “in that lyrical reflection, in that loneliness of the author’s self,” which partly makes him similar to ours. Chekhov"
Maugham was an artist who had a keen sense of the correspondence of a particular genre to the requirements of the moment, and this is also one of the reasons for his modernity. Sensing the emerging trend of merging literature and philosophy, anticipating the current “boom” of documentary, memoir, and biographical prose, he created wonderful travel essays “A Gentleman in the Living Room” (1930), “Don Fernando: Several Variations on a Spanish Theme” (1935) and the most “ personal" book "Summing Up" (1938).
Richard Aldington and Graham Greene admired the lively, full of intellectual brilliance of the prose of Don Fernando, the genuine love for Spain that the pages of the book breathe, the depth of penetration into history, culture, everyday life and national character Spaniards.
Maugham's travel books are not only skillful sketches; they attract not so much with information about unfamiliar places, but with the opportunity to communicate with an experienced traveler, a witty interlocutor, a brilliant storyteller, and listen interesting stories and funny anecdotes, think about the mysteries of human nature, reflect on the secrets of creativity, because no matter what Maugham wrote about in his essays, he invariably returned to literature - the main work of his whole life.
The Second World War found Maugham in France. On instructions from the English Ministry of Information, he studies the mood of the French, spends more than a month on the Maginot Line, and visits warships in Toulon. His reports, which formed the book “France at War” (1940), breathe with the confidence that “France will fulfill its duty” and will fight to the end. Three months after its release, France fell, and Maugham, having heard that the Nazis had blacklisted his name, barely reaches England on a coal barge, and later leaves for the United States, where he lives until the end of the war.
Having made a mistake in his forecast regarding France's ability to repel Hitler, Maugham compensates for it with a sharp analysis of the situation that led to defeat (the book "Very Personal", 1941). He writes that the French government, the prosperous bourgeoisie and aristocracy behind it, and wealthy circles in general were more afraid of Russian Bolshevism than of the German invasion. The tanks were kept not on the Maginot Line, but in the rear - in case of a riot by their own workers. Corruption corroded society, the spirit of decay took possession of the army.
Maugham was confident that the French, a brave and proud people, would free their homeland from slavery. The lesson he learned from tragic story defeat of France: "If a nation values something more than freedom, it will lose freedom, and the irony is that if that something is comfort or money, it will lose that too. A nation fighting for freedom can defend it if it has such values , like honesty, courage, loyalty, foresight and self-sacrifice. Without mastering them, she can only blame herself if she loses her freedom." The further course of the world war and the defeat of Nazi Germany in it showed the validity of Maugham’s conclusions.
Returning to the Riviera after the war, he found his house destroyed. The ancient Moorish sign, believed to protect against adversity, imprinted on the wall at the entrance to the villa and placed on the covers of his books, turned out to be powerless against modern vandalism. But the main thing is that fascism, which Maugham hated, was defeated, and life went on.
The post-war decade was fruitful for the writer. Maugham turns to the genre of historical novel for the first time. In the books “Then and Now” (1946), “Catalina” (1948), the past is read as a lesson for modernity. Maugham reflects in them on power and its impact on people, on the policies of rulers, and on noble patriotism. These last novels are written in a new manner for him, they are deeply tragic.
Maugham's last significant novel, The Razor's Edge (1944), turned out to be definitive in all respects. His idea was hatched for a long time. The plot was summarized in the story “The Fall of Edward Barnard” (1921). When asked how long it took him to write the book, Maugham replied: “All his life.” This is the result of his thoughts about the meaning of life. This is an attempt to create an image of a “positively beautiful person” (Dostoevsky’s expression). He becomes Larry Darrell, a young American who passed the test of the First World War. He refuses to return to his usual course and live “like everyone else,” i.e. to catch your chance in the post-war era of general prosperity. The “Great American Dream” does not attract him; he is indifferent to the prospects of enrichment and this makes him stand out sharply among his compatriots. Front-line experience encourages him to look for other values. For a long time, we had the idea of Maugham as an apolitical, almost asocial, writer. Meanwhile, Maugham was very sensitive to social processes, and "Razor's Edge" is another one bright that certificate.
At one time, he was the first to explore the topic of the “lost generation.” Now, in the novel, the action of which ends on the eve of the Second World War, he pointed out the trends that would determine the life of the “broken generation” of the 1950-1960s (“beatism”, “hippies”, appeal to Eastern cults and systems).
Having reached an age when the need to be critical of his surroundings begins to prevail, Maugham devotes himself entirely to essay writing. In 1948, his book “Great Writers and Their Novels” was published, the heroes of which were Fielding and Jane Austen, Stendhal and Balzac, Dickens and Emily Bronte, Melville and Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who accompanied Maugham throughout his long life.
Among the six essays that formed the collection Changeable Moods (1952), attention is drawn to memoirs about novelists whom he knew well - about H. James, H. Wells and A. Bennett, and an expertly written article "The Decline and Fall of the Detective ".
Maugham's last book, Points of View (1958), includes a long essay on the short story, of which he became a recognized master in the pre-war years.
Throughout his long life, Maugham expressed his views on the problems of creativity, issues of writing, and on understanding the tasks of literature.
Maugham has his own concept of the novel, short story, his own view of the theater and its tasks, his own judgments about the skill of the playwright and the role of the artist, the most interesting statements about art - all this is scattered in his numerous essays, critical and sketch prose, articles, prefaces, notes.
His criticism is sometimes subjective, but this is compensated by impeccable taste, deep intelligence, subtle irony, and breadth of approach. Maugham is true to himself: he is fascinating in all genres.
In his later years, Maugham came to the conclusion that a writer is more than a storyteller. There was a time when he liked to repeat, following Wilde, that the purpose of art is to give pleasure, that entertainment is an indispensable and main condition for success. Now he clarifies that by entertaining he means not what amuses, but what arouses interest. “The more intellectually entertaining a novel offers, the better it is.”
Literature should not teach, but must promote the growth of moral standards. Unlike Wilde, he perceives art and ethics in their unity. “Aesthetic experience has value only if it influences human nature and thus evokes in him an active attitude towards life” - this is an entry made in his diary in 1933. Later he returns to this idea and deepens it, asserting , What " pure art“It doesn’t exist that the slogan “art for art’s sake” is meaningless.
Maugham is convinced that the author offers his criticism of reality already by what events, what characters he chooses, as well as through his attitude towards them. Perhaps this criticism is not original and not very deep, but it exists, and because of this the writer is a moralist, albeit a very modest one. Maugham always believed that the artist's preaching is most effective if he does not even suspect that he is preaching.
Having repeated more than once that the art of writing “is not a sacrament, but a craft, like any other,” Maugham thought a lot about how a semblance of life is created in a narrative. Literature and life are inseparable concepts for him. The writer's subject is life in all its manifestations, but where does the novelist get that living tissue that serves as his material? A. Bennett believed that “he is cutting her off from himself.” Maugham also believed that the nature of fiction is necessarily autobiographical. Everything a writer creates “is an expression of his personality, a manifestation of his innate instincts, his feelings and experiences.” The personality of the author plays a decisive role in the selection of material. This invisible imprint lies on every page, for the great writer has his own unique vision of the world. The brighter and richer the author’s individuality, the greater his chances of giving the characters the illusion of originality.
“There is only one way to achieve success, as experience tells me,” writes Maugham, “by telling the truth, as you understand it, about what you know for certain... Imagination will help the writer to assemble an important or beautiful pattern from disparate facts. will help to see the whole behind the particular... However, if a writer sees the essence of things incorrectly, then imagination will only aggravate his mistakes, but correctly he can only see what he knows from personal experience.”
Maugham's reflections on the mission of a writer in the modern world have not lost their relevance to this day. “Now everyone knows,” he writes at the very beginning of the Second World War, “that the world is in a terrible state, freedom is dead or dying, everywhere you look there is poverty, unscrupulous exploitation of man by man, cruelty, injustice. Reasons for anger and pity enough; the trouble is that these feelings are meaningless if they do not lead to certain efforts. They are immoral if, satisfied with yourself and your generous emotions, you do not try to change the conditions that gave rise to them... The writer’s job is not to feel sorry and not to be angry. , but to understand."
A writer cannot be impartial. "His goal is not to copy life, but to dramatize it." He is ready to respect the naturalist artist for depicting life with fearless directness, for the absence of sweet syrup and cheap optimism in his works, but he refuses to consider verisimilitude the main advantage of art. This idea matured gradually. In the novel "The Burden of Human Passions" the hero - the author's alter ego - finds himself in Spain and "discovers" El Greco. The paintings of this enigmatic master are stunning and convince of the existence of a very special realism: everything in them contradicts plausibility and at the same time there is a much greater truth of life in them than that achieved by masters who worked in a traditional manner.
By creating his heroes, the writer captures barely emerging trends in modern times and anticipates life. The ability to create reality, not just copy, but create your own world, is what distinguishes a craftsman from a Master.
Honesty, tolerance, common sense, independence, broad education, the deepest knowledge of human nature and the craft of writing, high artistic skill, the ability to involve the reader in a conversation, allowing him to feel like an equal with him, the Master, is what makes Maugham the critic desirable interlocutor.
And another lesson from his “practical aesthetics” is instructive: openness to others national cultures. Today, more than ever, we need an example of perceiving art and the Beautiful as a universal property.
“It makes absolutely no difference who carved the statue - an ancient Greek or a modern Frenchman. The only important thing is that it now evokes aesthetic excitement in us and that this aesthetic excitement pushes us to action.”
Maugham considered his reasoning to be nothing more than an opinion, a personal point of view. And yet today they are perceived not only as evidence of a bygone literary era to which he belonged, but also as a key to understanding modern phenomena of reality and literature.
Literature
1. Quotes are given from Maugham’s works included in this collection, so the sources of citations are not indicated further.
2. Nagibin Yu. An unwritten story by Somerset Maugham // Get up and go: Tales and stories. M., 1989. P. 654.
3. It is unknown how many plays Maugham wrote. Some of them were preserved in manuscripts; the rest, shortly before his death, the writer destroyed along with most of his archive.
4. Shaginyan M. Foreign letters. M., 1964. P. 213.
5. In 1954, the book was published in a revised form under the title “Ten Novels and Their Creators.”
Biography (E. A. Guseva.)
Maugham William Somerset (25.1.1874, Paris, ? 16.12.1965, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France), English writer. Born into the family of a lawyer at the British Embassy in France. Received a medical education; practice in a poor quarter of London provided material for M.’s first novel, “Lisa from Lambeth” (1897). Participant of the 1st World War 1914?18; agent of British intelligence, including in Russia (collection of short stories “Ashenden, or the British Agent”, 1928). The first success was brought to M. by the plays: “Lady Frederick” (post. 1907), later? "The Circle" (1921), "Sheppie" (1933). In the novels “The Moon and a Penny” (1919, Russian translation 1927, 1960), “Gingerbread and Ale” (1930) M.’s rejection of religious hypocrisy and ugly petty-bourgeois morals were expressed. Attempts to free oneself from the baseness of bourgeois standards of life are shown in the novel “The Razor's Edge” (1944). The most famous is the largely autobiographical novel of education “The Burden of Human Passions” (1915; Russian translation, 1959); subtle psychologism in the depiction of the hero’s moral quest is combined with the breadth of the depicted picture of the world. M.'s creativity developed in line with critical realism, sometimes with elements of naturalism. M.'s works are always action-packed. M.’s notebooks, prefaces to his own and others’ books, and especially the book “Summing Up” (1938, Russian translation, 1957) are full of interesting observations on the creative process and contain a number of insightful literary assessments and self-assessments.
Op.:
* The collected edition of the works, v. 1?21, L., 1934?59;
* A writer's notebook, L., 1949; Points of view, Garden City (N.Y.), 1959; in Russian translation? Dozhd, M., 1961;
* Notes on creativity, “Questions of Literature”, 1966, No. 4; Theater, in collection:
* Modern English short story, M., 1969.
Lit.:
* Kanin G., Remembering Mr., Maugham, N. Y., ;
* Brown I., W. S. Maugham, L., 1970;
* Calder R. L., W. S. Maugham and the quest for freedom, L., 1972.
Biography (en.wikipedia.org)
Somerset Maugham was born on January 25, 1874 in Paris, in the family of a lawyer at the British Embassy in France. The parents specially prepared the birth on the territory of the embassy so that the child had legal grounds to say that he was born in the UK:
It was expected that a law would be passed by which all children born on French territory would automatically become French citizens and thus, upon reaching adulthood, be sent to the front in case of war.
As a child, Maugham spoke only French; he mastered English only after he was orphaned at the age of 11 (his mother died of consumption in February 1882, his father died of stomach cancer in June 1884) and was sent to relatives in the English town of Whitstable in the county. Kent, six miles from Canterbury. Upon arrival in England, Maugham began to stutter - this remained for the rest of his life.
Since William was brought up in the family of Henry Maugham, a vicar in Whitstable, he began his studies at the Royal School in Canterbury. Then he studied literature and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg - in Heidelberg Maugham wrote his first work - a biography of the German composer Meerbeer (when it was rejected by the publisher, Maugham burned the manuscript). Then he entered medical school (1892) at St. Thomas in London - this experience is reflected in Maugham's first novel, Lisa of Lambeth (1897). Maugham's first success in the field of literature came with the play Lady Frederick (1907). During the First World War, he collaborated with MI5 and was sent to Russia as an agent of British intelligence. The intelligence officer’s work was reflected in the collection of short stories “Ashenden, or the British Agent” (1928, Russian translation 1992).
In May 1917, Maugham married Siri Wellcome.
After the war, Maugham continued his successful career as a playwright, writing the plays The Circle (1921) and Sheppey (1933). Maugham's novels were also successful - “The Burden of Human Passions” (1915; Russian translation, 1959) - an almost autobiographical novel, “The Moon and a Penny” (1919, Russian translation, 1927, 1960), “Pies and Beer” (1930) , "The Razor's Edge" (1944).
In July 1919, Maugham, in pursuit of new impressions, went to China, and later to Malaysia, which gave him material for two collections of stories.
Maugham died on December 15, 1965 in a hospital in Nice from pneumonia. But since, according to French law, patients who died in hospital were required to undergo an autopsy, he was taken home and only on December 16 was it reported that Somerset Maugham had died at home, at Villa Moresque, in the French town of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat near Nice .
On December 22, his ashes were buried under the wall of the Maugham Library at the King's School in Canterbury.
Bibliography
Prose
* “Liza of Lambeth” (Liza of Lambeth, 1897)
* The Making of a Saint (1898)
* Orientations (1899)
* The Hero (1901)
* Mrs Craddock (1902)
* The Merry-go-round (1904)
* The Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia (1905)
* The Bishop's Apron (1906)
* The Explorer (1908)
* "The Magician" (1908)
* “The Burden of Human Passions” (Of Human Bondage, 1915; Russian translation 1959)
* “The Moon and Sixpence” (The Moon and Sixpence, 1919, Russian translation 1927, 1960)
* “The Trembling of a Leaf” (1921)
* “On a Chinese Screen” (On A Chinese Screen, 1922)
* “The Painted Veil” (1925)
* “Casuarina” (The Casuarina Tree, 1926)
* The Letter (Stories of Crime) (1930)
* “Ashenden, or the British Agent” (1928). Novels
* The Gentleman In The Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong (1930)
* “Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard” (1930)
* The Book Bag (1932)
* “The Narrow Corner” (1932)
* Ah King (1933)
* The Judgment Seat (1934)
* Don Fernando (1935)
* Cosmopolitans - Very Short Stories (1936)
* My South Sea Island (1936)
* “Theater” (Theatre, 1937)
* “Summing Up” (The Summing Up, 1938, Russian translation 1957)
* “Christmas Holiday”, (Christmas Holiday, 1939)
* Princess September and The Nightingale (1939)
* France At War (1940)
* Books and You (1940)
* “According to the same recipe” (The Mixture As Before, 1940)
* “Up at the Villa” (1941)
* Strictly Personal (1941)
* The Hour Before Dawn (1942)
* The Unconquered (1944)
* “The Razor's Edge” (1944)
* “Then and now. A Novel about Niccolò Machiavelli" (Then and Now, 1946)
* Of Human Bondage - An Address (1946)
* “Toys of Fate” (Creatures of Circumstance, 1947)
* "Catalina" (Catalina, 1948)
* Quartet (1948)
* Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948)
* “A Writer’s Notebook” (1949)
* Trio (1950)
* The Writer's Point of View" (1951)
* Encore (1952)
* The Vagrant Mood (1952)
* The Noble Spaniard (1953)
* “Ten Novels and Their Authors” (1954)
* “Point of View” (Points of View, 1958)
* Purely For My Pleasure (1962)
Plays
* A Man of Honor
* “Lady Frederick” (post. 1907)
* "Jack Straw" / "Jack Straw" (Jack Straw, 1908)
* "Mrs. Dot"
* "Penelope"
* The Explorer
* The Tenth Man
* "Nobility" (Landed Gentry, 1910)
* "Smith" (Smith, 1909)
*The Land of Promise
* The Unknown
* “The Circle” (1921)
* Caesar's Wife
*East of Suez
* Our Betters
*Home and Beauty
* The Unattainable
* Loaves and Fishes (1911)
* “The Constant Wife” (1927)
* The Letter
* The Sacred Flame
*The Bread-Winner
* For Services Rendered
* "Sheppie" (1933)
Film adaptations
* 1925 - “East of Suez” / East of Suez
* 1928 - Sadie Thompson
* 1929 - The Letter
* 1932 - Rain
* 1934 - “The Burden of Human Passions” / Of Human Bondage (with Bette Davis)
* 1934 - “The Painted Veil” (with Greta Garbo)
* 1938 - The Vessel of Wrath
* 1940 - The Letter
* 1942 - “The Moon and Sixpence” / The Moon and Sixpence
* 1946 - “The Razor's Edge” / The Razor's Edge
* 1946 - “The Burden of Human Passions” / Of Human Bondage
* 1948 - Quartet
* 1950 - Trio
* 1952 - Encore
* 1953 - Miss Sadie Thompson
* 1957 - The Seventh Sin
* 1958 - The Beachcomber
* 1962 - Julia, du bist zauberhaft
* 1964 - “The Burden of Human Passions” / Of Human Bondage
* 1969 - The Letter
* 1978 - “Theater” (with Vija Artmane and Ivars Kalnins)
* 1982 - The Letter
* 1984 - “The Razor's Edge” / The Razor's Edge (with Bill Murray)
* 2000 - Up at the Villa
* 2004 - “Theatre” / Being Julia (with Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons)
* 2006 - The Painted Veil (with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts)
Interesting facts
* During the First World War, he collaborated with MI5 and was sent to Russia as an agent of British intelligence.
* ...Because of his short stature (152 cm), Maugham was declared unfit for military service and he did not go to the fronts of the First World War. He got a job as a driver for the Red Cross. In 1915, an officer from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) drew attention to him and recruited him as a secret agent.
* Maugham's candidacy was perfectly suited for work outside Foggy Albion. Firstly, having lived for several years in France and Germany, he was fluent in German and French. Secondly, he had a real cover - literary activity.
* Maugham spent almost a year in Switzerland, where he conducted surveillance of persons suspected of spying for Germany. Maintained contacts with representatives of various allied intelligence services. He regularly sent detailed reports to SIS and simultaneously worked on plays.