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 the very early childhood he was predicted to have a future as a lawyer, since both his father and grandfather were prominent lawyers, two brothers later became lawyers, and the second brother Frederick Herbert, who later became Lord Chancellor and Peer of England, was considered the most successful. 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 sudden death his mother Edith died of 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 source of ridicule.
Therefore, moving to Germany in 1890 to study at the University of Heidelberg 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 or inclination towards 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. Subsequently, he would receive a diploma as a physician and surgeon, 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.
The period of his life associated with his medical career is visible in his novel "Lisa of Lambeth", which was published by Fisher Unwin 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 "Avenue Theater" the play will be shown 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. and others.
Maugham would later write that this idea was doomed to failure 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 point was Maugham’s writing of a collection of short stories, “Ashenden or the 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" Writers of the time such as Thomas Wolfe and Theodore Dreiser recognized the novel as a genius. During the same period of time, Maugham gravitated towards a new direction for him - socio-psychological drama. Examples of such works are “The Unknown”, “For Merit”, “Sheppy”.
When did the second one begin? World War 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. His book “France at War” is permeated with the same sentiments.
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” and “Catalina” the writer talks about power and its influence on people, about rulers and their policies, and pays attention to true patriotism. In these novels it is visible new style writing novels, there is a lot of tragedy in them. “The Razor's Edge” 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 last years he immerses himself in writing an essay. And the book “Great Writers and Their Novels,” published in 1848, is a clear confirmation of this. In this book, the reader meets such heroes 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 “Changable Moods” was published, consisting of six essays, where memories of such novelists as G. James, G. Wells and A. Bennett, with whom Somerset Maugham was personally acquainted, are visible.
The writer died on December 15, 1965. It happened in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, 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.
Writer.
“As experience tells me, you can achieve success in only one way - 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. It 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" S. Maugham
Fate decreed that Somerset Maugham lived for ninety years and at the end of his life the writer came to the conclusion that he had always lived for the future. Maugham's creative longevity is impressive: having begun his career at the time of the growing fame of the late Victorians - Hardy, Kipling and Wilde, he ended it when new stars appeared on the literary horizon - Golding, Murdoch, Fowles and Spark. And at every turn of rapidly changing historical times, Maugham remained a modern writer.
In their Maugham's works comprehended the problems of a universal human and general philosophical plan, he was surprisingly sensitive to the tragic beginning characteristic of the events of the 20th century, as well as to the hidden drama of characters and human relationships. At the same time, he was often reproached for dispassion and cynicism, to which Maugham himself, following the idol of his youth, Maupassant, replied: “I am, without a doubt, considered one of the most indifferent people in the world. I’m a skeptic, it’s not the same thing, a skeptic, because I have good eyes. My eyes tell my heart: hide, old man, you are funny. And the heart hides."
William Somerset Maugham was born on January 25, 1874 in the family of a hereditary lawyer who served in the English embassy in Paris. Maugham's childhood, spent in France, passed in an atmosphere of goodwill, affectionate care and tender love of his mother, and childhood impressions determined much in his future life.
An Englishman, Maugham spoke predominantly French until the age of ten. Primary school he also graduated in France, and his English was later laughed at by his classmates for a long time when he returned to England. “I was embarrassed by the British,” Maugham admitted. He was eight years old when his mother died, and at the age of ten Maugham lost his father. This happened when the house in which his family was supposed to live was completed on the outskirts of Paris. But there was no more family - Somerset's older brothers studied at Cambridge, and were preparing to become lawyers, and Willie was sent to England in the care of his priest uncle Henry Maugham. It was in his parsonage that Maugham spent his school years, growing up lonely and withdrawn, feeling like an outsider at school, and very different from the boys growing up in England, who laughed at Maugham’s stuttering and his way of speaking English. He was unable to overcome his painful shyness. “I will never forget the suffering of these years,” said Maugham, who avoided memories of his childhood. He always had a constant wariness, a fear of being humiliated, and developed the habit of observing everything from a certain distance.
Books and a passion for reading helped Maugham escape from his surroundings. Willie lived in a world of books, among which his favorites were the tales of “The Arabian Nights,” “Alice in Wonderland” by Carroll, “Waverley” by Scott and the adventure novels of Captain Marryat. Maugham drew well, loved music, and could have applied for a place at Cambridge, but he was not deeply interested in it. He had fond memories of his teacher Thomas Field, whom Maugham later described under the name of Tom Perkins in the novel The Burden of Human Passions. But the joy of communicating with Field could not outweigh what Maugham had to learn in the classrooms and dormitories of the boarding school for boys.
The health of his nephew, who grew up as a sickly child, forced his guardian to send Maugham 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. At the university, Maugham felt his calling, but in a respectable family the position of a professional writer was considered dubious, his three older brothers were already lawyers, and Maugham decided to become a doctor. In the autumn of 1892, he returned to England and entered medical school at St. Thomas's Hospital in Lambeth, the poorest area of London. Maugham later recalled: “During the years that I practiced medicine, I systematically studied English, French, Italian and Latin literature. I read a lot of books on history, some on philosophy and, of course, on natural science and medicine.”
Medical practice, which began in his third year, unexpectedly interested him. And three years of hard work in the hospital wards of one of the poorest areas of London helped Maugham understand human nature much deeper than the books he had previously read. And Somerset concluded: "I don't know best school for a writer than being a doctor." “During these three years,” Maugham wrote in his autobiographical book “Summing Up,” “I witnessed all the emotions of which a person is capable. It ignited my instinct as a playwright, stirred the writer in me... I saw people die. I saw how they endured pain. I saw what hope, fear, relief look like; I saw the black shadows that despair casts on faces; I saw courage and perseverance.”
Practicing medicine affected the characteristics creative manner Maugham. Like other physician writers Sinclair Lewis and John O'Hara, his prose was devoid of exaggeration. The strict regime - from nine to six in the hospital - left Maugham free only in the evenings for literary studies, which Somerset spent reading books, and still He learned to write. He translated Ibsen’s “Ghosts”, trying to study the playwright’s technique, wrote plays and stories, Maugham sent the manuscripts of two stories to the publisher Fisher Unwin, and one of them received a favorable review from E. Garnet, a well-known authority in the field. literary circles. Garnet advised the unknown author to continue writing, and the publisher replied: what is needed is not stories, but a novel. After reading Unwin's response, Maugham immediately began creating Lisa of Lambeth. In September 1897, this novel was published.
“When I started working on Lisa of Lambeth, I tried to write it the way, in my opinion, Maupassant should have done it,” Maugham later admitted. The book was not born under the influence literary images, but the author’s real impressions. Maugham tried to reproduce with maximum accuracy the life and customs of Lambeth, into whose ominous corners not every policeman dared to look, and where Maugham’s pass and safe-conduct served as the obstetrician’s black suitcase.
The appearance of Maugham's novel was preceded by loud scandal, inspired by T. Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure, published in 1896. The fervor of the critics who accused Hardy of naturalism was thoroughly spent, and Maugham's debut was relatively calm. Moreover, tragic story girls, told with stern truthfulness and without a hint of any sentimentality, was a success among readers. And soon great luck awaited the aspiring writer in the theatrical field.
At first his one-act plays were rejected, but in 1902 one of them, “Marriages Are Made in Heaven,” was staged in Berlin. In England, it never came to be staged, although Maugham published the play in the small magazine "Adventure". For real successful career Maugham's career as a playwright began with the comedy Lady Frederic, staged in 1903, which was also directed by Court-Tietre in 1907. In the 1908 season, four of Maugham's plays were already performed in London. Bernard Partridge's cartoon appeared in Punch, which depicted Shakespeare languishing with envy in front of posters with the writer's name. Along with entertaining comedies, Maugham also created acutely critical plays in the pre-war years: “The Cream of the Society”, “Smith” and “The Promised Land”, which raised themes of social inequality, hypocrisy and corruption of representatives of the highest echelons of power. Maugham wrote about his profession as a playwright: “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 recalled that the reaction to his plays was mixed: “The public newspapers praised the plays for their wit, gaiety and theatricality, but scolded them for their cynicism; more serious critics were merciless towards them. They called them cheap, vulgar, and told me that I had sold my soul to Mammon. And the intelligentsia, which previously counted me among its 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 the new Lucifer.” On the eve of the First World War, his plays were successfully performed both in London theaters and overseas. But the war changed Maugham's life. He was drafted into the army, and first served in a medical battalion, and then joined British intelligence. Carrying out her assignments, he spent a year in Switzerland, and then was sent by Intelligence Service employees on a secret mission to Russia. At first, Maugham perceived this kind of activity, like Kipling’s Kim, as participation in the “great game,” but later, when talking about this stage of his life, he called espionage not only dirty, but also boring work. 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 gave him the impression of being insignificant and indecisive person. Of all politicians The Russians with whom I had a chance to talk, Maugham singled out only Savinkov as a major and extraordinary personality. Having received a secret assignment from Kerensky to Lloyd George, Maugham left for London on October 18, but a week later a revolution began in Russia, and his mission lost its meaning. But Maugham did not regret his fiasco, he subsequently made fun of his fate as an unsuccessful agent and was grateful to fate for the “Russian adventure.” Maugham wrote about Russia: “Endless conversations where action was required; fluctuations; apathy leading directly to disaster; the pompous declarations, insincerity and lethargy that I observed everywhere - all this alienated me from Russia and the Russians.” But he was glad to visit the country where Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment were written, and to discover Chekhov. He later said: “When the English intelligentsia became interested in Russia, I remembered that Cato began to study Greek at the age of eighty, 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 what little I knew then was long forgotten.”
The time between the two world wars was filled with intense writing and travel for Maugham. He spent two years in a tuberculosis sanatorium, which gave him inexhaustible new material for creativity, and later he acted in several capacities at once: as a novelist, playwright, short story writer, essayist and essayist. And his comedies and dramas began to compete on stage with the plays of Bernard Shaw himself. Maugham had real “stage instinct.” Writing plays came to him with amazing ease. They were full of winning roles, originally constructed, and the dialogue in them was always sharp and witty.
In the post-war period, significant changes occurred in Maugham's dramaturgy. In the comedy The Circle, written by him in 1921, Maugham sharply criticized the immorality of high society. The tragedy of the “lost generation” was revealed by him in the play “The Unknown”. Also, the atmosphere of the “roaring thirties”, the deep economic crisis, the growing threat of fascism and a new world war determined the social sound of his last plays “For Special Merit” and “Sheppie”.
Maugham later wrote the novels “The Burden of Human Passions,” “The Moon and the Penny,” “Pies and Beer, or the Skeleton in the Closet.” Their film adaptation brought the writer wide fame, and the autobiographical novel “The Burden of Human Passions” was recognized by critics and readers as the writer’s best achievement. Written in line with the traditional “novel of education,” it was distinguished by its amazing openness and utmost sincerity in revealing the drama of the soul. Theodore Dreiser was delighted with the novel and called Maugham a “great artist” and the book he wrote “a work of genius,” comparing it to Beethoven’s symphony. Maugham wrote 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; I experienced the feelings described in it myself, but not all the episodes happened as described, and they were taken partly not from my life, but from the lives of people who were well known to me.”
Another paradox of Maugham is his personal life. Maugham was bisexual. His service as a special agent brought him to the United States, where the writer met a man for whom he 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 Maugham's personal secretary and lover. The writer Beverly Nicolet, one of Maugham's friends, testified: “Maugham was not a “pure” homosexual. He, of course, also had love affairs with women; and there was no sign of feminine behavior or feminine mannerisms.” And Maugham himself wrote: “Let those who like me accept me as I am, and let the rest not accept me at all.” Maugham had a lot love affairs With famous women- in particular, with the famous feminist and editor of the magazine "Free Woman" Violet Hunt, and with Sasha Kropotkin - the daughter of the famous Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who lived in exile in London. However, only two women played an important role in Maugham's life. The first was the daughter of the famous playwright Ethelwyn Jones, better known as Sue Jones. Maugham loved her very much, 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 a 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, whom she soon married.
Another of the writer's women was Cyrie Barnardo Wellcome, whom Maugham met in 1911. Her father was known for founding a network of shelters for homeless children, and Sairee herself had an unsuccessful family life. For some time, Cyrie and Maugham were inseparable, they had a daughter, whom they named Elizabeth, but Cyrie's husband found out about her relationship with Maugham and filed for divorce. Cyrie attempted suicide but survived, and when Cyrie divorced, Maugham married her. But soon Maugham's feelings for his wife changed. 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 didn’t marry you because I loved you so much, and you know this very well.” Maugham and Cyrie soon began to live separately, and a few years later Cyrie filed for divorce, getting it in 1929. Maugham wrote: “I have loved many women, but I have never known the bliss of mutual love.”
In the mid-thirties, Maugham purchased the Cap-Ferrat villa on the French Riviera, which became the home for the rest of the writer's life and one of the great literary and social salons. Winston Churchill visited the writer, H.G. Wells, Soviet writers came occasionally. His work continued to expand with plays, short stories, novels, essays and travel books. By 1940, Somerset Maugham had 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.”
The Second World War found Maugham in France. On instructions from the English Ministry of Information, he studied the mood of the French, spent more than a month on the Maginot Line, and visited warships in Toulon. He was confident that France would do its duty and fight to the end. His reports on this formed the book France at War, published in 1940. Three months after its release, France fell, and Maugham, who learned that the Nazis had blacklisted his name, barely made it to England on a coal barge, and later left for the United States, where he lived until the end of the war. For most of World War II, Maugham was in Hollywood, where he worked on scripts and made changes to them, and later lived in the South.
Having made a mistake in his forecast about France's ability to repel Hitler, Maugham compensated for it in the book Very Personal with a sharp analysis of the situation that led to defeat. He wrote that the French government, and the prosperous bourgeoisie and aristocracy behind it, 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 revolt by their own workers, corruption corroded society, and the spirit of decay took possession of the army.
In 1944, Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge was published and his colleague and lover Gerald Haxton died, after which Maugham moved to England, and then in 1946 to his ruined villa in France. The novel "The Razor's Edge" turned out to be the final one for Maugham in all respects. His idea was hatched for a long time, and the plot was briefly outlined in the story “The Fall of Edward Barnard” back in 1921. When asked how long he wrote this book, Maugham replied: “All his life.” In fact, the novel was the result of his thoughts about the meaning of life.
Post-war decade was also fruitful for the writer. Maugham first turned to the genre historical novel. In the books “Then and Now” and “Catalina,” the past appeared before readers as a lesson for the present. Maugham reflected in them on power and its impact on people, on the policies of rulers and on patriotism. These latest novels were written in a manner new to him and were deeply tragic.
After losing Haxton, Maugham resumed his intimate relationship with Alan Searle, a young man from the London slums whom he had met in 1928 while he was working for a hospital charity. Alan became the writer's new secretary, adored Maugham, who officially adopted him, depriving his daughter Elizabeth of the right to inherit, having learned that she was going to limit his rights to property through the court. Later, Elizabeth, through the court, nevertheless 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. Having reached the age when the need to be critical of his surroundings begins to prevail, Maugham devoted 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 in life. Among the six essays that formed the collection “Changeable Moods”, memories of novelists whom he knew well - about H. James, H. Wells and A. Bennett, as well as the article “The Decline and Destruction of the Detective Story” attracted attention.
The last book Maugham's Points of View, published in 1958, included a long essay on short story, of which he became a recognized master in the pre-war years. 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 clarified that by entertaining he means not what amuses, but what arouses interest: “The more intellectually entertaining a novel offers, the better it is.”
On December 15, 1965, Somerset Maugham died at the age of 92 in the French town of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat from pneumonia. His ashes were scattered under the wall of the Maugham Library, at the King's School in Canterbury.
Maugham herself said it best about her life: “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 like those I met there. and these people I built a play, a novel or a story.”
The text was prepared by Tatyana Halina ( halimoshka )
Used materials:
Materials from the Wikipedia site
Text of the article “William Somerset Maugham: The Facets of Talent”, author G. E. Ionkis
Materials from the site www.modernlib.ru
Materials from the site www.bookmix.ru
Prose
- "Liza of Lambeth" (Liza of Lambeth, 1897)
- The Making of a Saint (1898)
- "Orientations" (Orientations, 1899)
- The Hero (1901)
- "Mrs. Craddock" (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” (1922)
- “The Patterned Veil” / “The Painted Veil” (The Painted Veil, 1925)
- "Casuarina" (The Casuarina Tree, 1926)
- The Letter (Stories of Crime) (1930)
- "Ashenden, or the British Agent" (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" (Don Fernando, 1935)
- "Cosmopolitans" (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" (France At War, 1940)
- Books and You (1940)
- "According to the same recipe" (The Mixture As Before, 1940)
- “Up at the Villa” (1941)
- "Very Personal" (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)
- The Force of Circumstance ("Selected Short Stories")
- "Shipwreck" (Flotsam and Jetsam, "Selected Short Stories")
- The Creative Impulse("Selected Short Stories")
- Virtue("Selected Short Stories")
- The Treasure("Selected Short Stories")
- In a Strange Land("Selected Short Stories")
- The Consul("Selected Short Stories")
- "Exactly a Dozen" (The Round Dozen, "Selected Short Stories")
- Footprints in the Jungle, Selected Short Stories
- "A Friend In Need"
William Somerset Maugham
Date and place of birth: January 25, 1874, Embassy of the United Kingdom, Paris, French Third Republic.
British writer, one of the most successful prose writers of the 1930s, author of 78 books, British intelligence agent.
William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 in Paris, where his father was a lawyer at the British Embassy. Having lost his mother for eight years and his father for ten years, Maugham was raised in London by his uncle, in whose house an atmosphere of Puritan severity reigned. He then studied at a boarding school in Canterbury and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
To acquire a profession, he entered the medical school at St. Thomas in London. Here he acquired knowledge of medicine and a certain life experience. He faced not only the physical suffering of man, but also the poverty of the inhabitants of the slums of London's East End, and social inequality.
Medical practice that brought him closer to ordinary people, gave him material for entering literature. The success of the first novels “Lisa of Lambeth” and “Mrs. Cradock,” although very modest, forced Maugham to part with medicine and devote himself entirely to writing. True, his first novels did not bring him much income. Having subsequently become one of the wealthiest writers in the world, Maugham recalled with a grin that for the first ten years he earned an average of about one hundred pounds a year with his pen, which was not much more than the earnings of low-paid day laborers.
Pushed by material motives, Maugham became interested in drama. During the first two decades this century he writes play after play. Some of them, in particular “Man of Honour”, “Lady Frederick”, “Smith”, “The Promised Land”, “The Circle”, were successful, and there were years when more plays by Maugham were performed simultaneously on the stages of England than by Bernard Shaw .
However, working on the plays did not bring complete satisfaction to the author himself. He wrote for the theater, caring most of all about the stage entertainment of his works. This determined his success with the viewer, but also limited his creative possibilities, forcing him to put rich life material into Procrustean bed a certain plot, no matter how skillfully and fascinatingly it is constructed. At the zenith of his dramatic fame, Maugham decided to write a novel in order, as he later admitted, “to free himself from the huge number of difficult memories that never ceased to haunt me.” After the publication of this novel, “The Burden of Human Passions,” which brought the author wide fame, he increasingly takes up the pen of a narrator rather than a playwright.
In the twenties of our century, Maugham also established himself as a master of the story. His short stories, varied in form, reveal to the reader inner world person. Maugham tries to show the soul of a person, sometimes snatching him from the social environment.
B the time of human passions
But still among large number Of Maugham's novels, plays, stories and essays, the novel The Burden of Human Passion is most famous both in England and abroad. Let us note by the way that the title of the novel is taken from the title of one of the sections of Spinoza’s “Ethics”, which in literal translation reads: “On human slavery.” However, in order for the title of the novel to convey the meaning of this chapter of Spinoza’s treatise, Maugham agreed that this work should be called “The Burden of Human Passions” in the Russian edition.
The writer himself, answering the question why he does not consider “The Burden of Human Passions” his best novel, indicated that it is just an “autobiographical book” that reflects his own painful experiences. In the author's preface to one of American publications Maugham’s novel calls it “semi-autobiographical” and notes: “I say semi-autobiographical because such a work is still fiction, and the author has the right to change the facts with which he deals as he sees fit.”
And indeed, many facts of his life that the author talks about in the novel have been changed - some are weakened, others are strengthened, others are given a different interpretation or expression. For example, the lameness that brings so much inconvenience and moral torment to the hero of the novel, Philip Carey, did not torment Maugham himself, but the writer suffered from another physical defect, a stutter, which caused him almost the same troubles and moral pain. The experiences of young Philip, judging by the confessions of the author himself, largely coincide with the experiences of Maugham. Like his hero, he lost his parents early, was raised in a family of relatives, and went through all the stages of his youthful quest.
But it would be wrong to assume that in the novel “The Burden of Human Passions” the author simply told the story of one hero, close to his own biography. The reader is presented with a motley gallery of various types, each with their own biographies and characters, described by the author with amazing care.
Maugham painted the life of certain layers of England of that time with such vividness that in many ways “The Burden of Human Passions” can be ranked alongside the significant works of the greatest English realist writers.
An idealistic idea of people underlies the main plot line of the novel - Philip's love for a woman who, according to all existing standards relationship between a man and a woman could not be loved by him. Maugham wanted to prove that a person can love not only contrary to reason, but also contrary to his very nature. This love for a narrow-minded, stupid, vicious, unscrupulous woman on the part of a person who is disgusted by everything ugly, who has refined tastes, sometimes seems simply unthinkable.
Acts from life
Somerset Maugham was born and died in France, but the writer was a subject of the British Crown - his parents arranged the birth in such a way that the child was born at the embassy.
“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.”
At the age of 10, Maugham began to stutter, which he was never able to get rid of.
Although Somerset Maugham was for a long time married to Siri Welcome, with whom he had a daughter, Mary Elizabeth, the writer was bisexual. At one time he was in love with actress Sue Jones, whom he was ready to marry again. But Maugham had the longest relationship with the American Gerald Haxton, an avid gambler and drunkard, who was his secretary.
During the First World War he collaborated with MI5. After the war, he worked in Russia with a secret mission, was in Petrograd in August-October 1917, where he was supposed to help the Provisional Government remain in power, and fled after the October Revolution.
Until the age of ten, William spoke only French. The writer began to learn English after moving to England after the death of his parents.
Celebrities often visited his house on Cape Ferrat - Winston Churchill, Herbert Wells, Jean Cocteau, Noël Coward, and even several Soviet writers.
The intelligence officer’s work was reflected in the collection of 14 short stories “Ashenden, or the British Agent” -1928.
In 1928, Maugham bought a villa on the French Riviera. For forty years, the writer was helped by about 30 servants. However, the fashionable surroundings did not dampen him - every day he worked in his office, where he wrote at least 1,500 words.
"Before you write new novel“I always re-read Candide so that later I can unconsciously equal this standard of clarity, grace and wit.”
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.
Dying, he said: “Dying is a boring and joyless thing. My advice to you is never do this.”
In 1947, the Somerset Maugham Prize was established, which was awarded to English writers under the age of 35.
Maugham always placed his desk opposite a blank wall so that nothing would distract him from his work. He worked for three to four hours in the morning, fulfilling his self-imposed quota of 1000-1500 words.
Somerset Maugham has no grave - his ashes are scattered at the walls of the Maugham Library in Canterbury
Maugham wrote his first novel, “Lisa of Lambeth,” in 1897, but success came to the writer only in 1907 with the play “Lady Frederick.” But he burned his very first literary experience - a biography of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer - because it was rejected by the publisher.
Quotes and aphorisms
The funny thing about life is that if you refuse to accept anything other than the best, that's often what you get.
People may forgive you for the good you have done for them, but they rarely forget the evil they have done to you.
People love nothing more than to put a label on another person that once and for all frees them from the need to think.
A well-dressed person is one whose clothes are not noticed.
Dreams are not an escape from reality, but a means to get closer to it.
People are evil to the extent that they are unhappy.
There is no worse torture in the world than to love and despise at the same time.
Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
Writing simply and clearly is as difficult as being sincere and kind.
There is only one success - to spend your life the way you want.
A woman will always sacrifice herself if given the right opportunity. This is her favorite way to please herself.
...for a person accustomed to reading, it becomes a drug, and he himself becomes its slave. Try to take his books away from him, and he will become gloomy, twitchy and restless, and then, like an alcoholic who, if left without alcohol, attacks the shelves.
Alas, in our imperfect world it is much easier to get rid of good habits than bad ones.
Kindness is the only value in this illusory world that can be an end in itself.
Life is ten percent what you do in it, and ninety percent how you receive it.
Knowing the past is unpleasant enough; knowing the future would be simply unbearable.
Tolerance is another name for indifference.
Each generation laughs at its fathers, laughs and laughs at its grandfathers and admires its great-grandfathers.
A person is not what he wants to be, but what he cannot help being.
The most valuable thing life has taught me is: don’t regret anything.
We are no longer the people we were last year, nor are we the people we love. But it’s wonderful if, while we change, we continue to love those who have also changed.
And women can keep secrets. But they cannot keep silent about the fact that they kept silent about the secret.
Somerset Maugham - biography, facts, quotes - The Burden of Human Passions updated: October 20, 2017 by: website
MAUGH, WILLIAM SOMERSET(Maugham, William Somerset) (1874–1965), 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 as a therapist and surgeon, but never practiced medicine: while still a student he published his first novel Lisa from Lambeth (Lisa of Lambeth, 1897), which absorbed impressions from student practice in this area of the 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: four of his plays - Jack Straw (Jack Straw, 1908), Smith (Smith, 1909), Nobility (Landed Gentry, 1910), Of bread and fish (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 southern part Pacific Ocean. The secret agent's work is vividly reflected in his collection of short stories Ashenden, or British Agent (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 wrote 25 plays, 21 novels and more than 100 short stories, but he was not an innovator in any literary genre. His famous comedies such as Circle (The Circle , 1921), Faithful wife (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 largely autobiographical The burden of human passions (Of Human Bondage) And Gingerbread and ale (Cakes and Ale, 1930); exotic Moon and penny (The Moon and Sixpence, 1919), inspired by fate French artist P. Gauguin; a tale of the south seas Tight corner (The Narrow Corner, 1932); razor edge (The Razor"sEdge, 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 Maugham (eng. William Somerset Maugham [ˈsʌməsɪt mɔːm]; January 25, 1874, Paris - December 16, 1965, Nice)- English writer, one of the most successful prose writers of the 1930s, British intelligence agent.
Maugham was born into the family of a diplomat, orphaned at an early age, and raised in the family of an uncle-priest and a boarding school for boys, Kings School; studied medicine and received a medical degree. After the success of his first book, Lisa of Lambeth (1897), he decided to leave medicine and become a writer. This period of his life is indirectly reflected in his novels “The Burden of Human Passions” (1915) and “Pies and Beer, or the Skeleton in the Closet” (1930). Several novels written next did not bring money, and Maugham turned to drama. After the resounding success of the comedy Lady Frederick (1907), Maugham became a successful author. From that time on, he often traveled around the world, in particular, carrying out assignments for British intelligence in 1916-1917, and visited Russia, which he described in the collection of stories “Ashenden, or the British Agent” (1928). That same year, he bought a villa on the French Cote d'Azur and lived there permanently, except for the period from October 1940 to mid-1946. The urn with Maugham's ashes, in accordance with his will, was buried near the wall of the King's School library, created with his money and bearing his name.
Playwright and essayist. Maugham owns light comedies of character and situation, evil satires on morals and socio-psychological dramas like “For Merit” (1932) with acute conflict and an accurate depiction of historical time. His plays - about 30 of them were staged in 1903-1933 - are distinguished by dynamic action, careful development of mise-en-scène, and compact, lively dialogue. However, the writer’s main contribution to literature is short stories, novels and essays, including the book “Summing Up” (1938), in which a free essay on literature and art, a careful author’s confession and an aesthetic treatise are fused into a remarkable artistic whole.
Narrator. Exquisite mastery of form - a tightly constructed plot, strict selection of material, capacious detail, dialogue as natural as breathing, masterful mastery of the semantic and sound richness of the native language, relaxed conversational and at the same time restrained, subtly skeptical intonation of the narrative, clear, economical, simple style - makes Maugham a classic of the 20th century short story. The diversity of characters, types, situations, conflicts, the combination of pathology and norms, good and evil, scary and funny, everyday life and exoticism transform his short story legacy (the complete collection of stories he prepared in 1953 includes 91 works) into a kind of “human tragicomedy.” However, this code is softened by endless tolerance, wise irony and a fundamental reluctance to act as a judge of one’s neighbor. In Maugham, life seems to tell itself, judges itself and makes a moral verdict, while the author is nothing more than an observer and chronicler of what is depicted.
Novelist. The virtues of objective manner of writing and brilliant style, to which Somerset Maugham owes in no small degree his love for the masters of French prose, are inherent in his best novels. In addition to "The Burden", this is a novel about the artist "The Moon and a Penny" (1919) and a novel about the actress "Theater" (1937), which together with the novel about the writer "Pies and Beer" form something of a trilogy about the creators of art, its meaning and attitude To real life, as well as The Patterned Veil (1925), Christmas Vacation (1939) and The Razor's Edge (1944). Behind the relationships between the characters, the clashes of their aspirations, passions and natures, Maugham clearly reveals an artistic and philosophical analysis of some “eternal” themes of world literature: the meaning of life, love, death, the essence of beauty, the purpose of art. Constantly returning to the problem of the comparative value of the moral and the beautiful, which worried him, Maugham in each case, although in different ways, gave preference to the first, as is clear from the logic of the images he created: “... the most beauty lies in a well-lived life. This - the highest work of art" ("Patterned Cover"). The life of Larry Durrell, the main character of Maugham's final novel, The Razor's Edge, is the artistic embodiment of this highest form of beauty.
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