WILLIE, THE LIFE OF W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Robert Calder
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990
432 pp., $19.95
When the English writer and expatriate Christopher Isherwood met W. Somerset Maugham in Hollywood during World War II, he likened him to “an old Gladstone bag covered with labels" - God only knew what was inside. Robert Calder's biography, Willie, The Life of W. Somerset Maugham, is a valiant attempt to discover just what lay beneath the crusty exterior of one of the most prolific and successful authors of this century - a man whose literary output was relentless and varied, whose life was filled with adventure, and whose personality was a study in contradictions.
As Calder points out, the writer who lived entirely by his pen was a rarity in Maugham's day, yet Maugham set out to do that with the same determination that was to mark every aspect of his life. When he died in 1965, he had produced thirty-one plays, nineteen novels, nine collections of short stories, and twelve works of nonfiction. In 1908 he became, almost overnight, the most popular dramatist in London. Now, of course, we remember him for a small part of his work, for stories like "Rain" and "The Letter"; for his best novels, Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, The Razor's Edge; and for the films that were made from them - Bette Davis' unforgettably cruel Mildred playing against Leslie Howard's sensitive, clubfooted Philip in the movie version of Of Human Bondage.
A difficult coming of age
Maugham's strength is his psychological acuity, more typical, in many ways, of the French novel than of its English counterpart. Of Human Bondage presents vividly the effects of an unhappy childhood on a young man coming of age. When Philip Carey, like Maugham orphaned as a child and brought up in lonely vicarage, finally escapes to medical school, he manages to re-create his earlier misery by falling abjectly in love with a tearoom waitress who subjects him to endless torment and ridicule. Its theme, Calder notes, is emotional enslavement, something which, in its many guises, Maugham fought hard to overcome all his life.
Influenced by Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, and taking its title from one of the books of Spinoza's Ethics, Of Human Bondage appeared in 1915 to amazingly bad reviews. The New York World called its subject "the sentimental servitude of a poor fool" and Punch called the main characters "repellent." But Theodore Dreiser, writing in the New Republic, called it a work of genius and compared it to a Beethoven symphony. The book's popularity grew steadily, and it has never been out of print. (Clare Boothe Luce, then an unhappy teenager living in Connecticut, was so moved by it that she poured out her heart to the author in a long letter. She received a six-page handwritten reply, in which he assured her that an unhappy childhood could be a great blessing, for it made one determined to find greater happiness in later life.)
Maugham had sought, in writing this very autobiographical novel, to find a means of liberation from his past suffering; he believed that by making his private feelings public they would cease to be his. Thirty years later, however, the feelings were
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