Somerset Maugham. William Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham was born on January 25, 1874 at the British Embassy in Paris. This birth of a child was more planned 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 or 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.

A special place in the writer’s work is the autobiographical novel “The Burden of 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.

Years of life: from 01/25/1874 to 12/15/1965

"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 degree of 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 an extremely beautiful woman, and he was an extremely ugly man. I was told that in Paris they were nicknamed Beauty and the Beast.”

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 was not the best time in young Maugham's life. 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 about 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 the University of Heidelberg 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 the 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 USA. 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 Cyri 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 of 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 a charity organization at a 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.

His best books, which have stood the test of time and ensured his place among the classics of English literature of the 20th century, pose large, universal and philosophical problems.

“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 unconsciously equal this standard of clarity, grace and wit.”

“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 that was a little What I knew then has long been 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 amusement, 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 from the people I met here and there I built a play, a novel or story".

Writer's Awards

Order of the Knights of Honor - 1954

Bibliography

Novels:
* Lisa of Lambeth (1897)
* (1908)
* (1915)
* (1919)
* (1921)
* (1922)
* (1925)
* Casuarina (1926)
* (1928) Collection of short stories
* Gingerbread and ale () (1930)
* (Small Corner) (1932)
* (1937)
* (1938)
* (1939)

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 in medicine and 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, which 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 of this century he wrote 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 creative possibilities, forcing him to put rich life material into the Procrustean bed of a certain plot, no matter how skillfully and excitingly it was 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 the inner world of a 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 the large number of novels, plays, stories and essays, Maugham’s novel “The Burden of Human Passions” is the 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 the American editions of the novel, Maugham 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 storyline of the novel - Philip’s love for a woman who, according to all existing norms of relationships 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.

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 writing a new novel, I always re-read Candide, so that later I 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 in 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 the publisher rejected it.

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 was born on January 25, 1874 at the British Embassy in Paris. This birth of a child was more planned 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, 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.

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.

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.

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 “The Burden of 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”.

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. These novels show a new style of 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 his last years, he immersed himself 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 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.

William Somerset Maugham (English: William Somerset Maugham, born 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.

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 for the birth on the territory of the embassy so that the child would have legal grounds to say that he was born in Great Britain: it was expected that a law would be passed according to which all children born on French territory would automatically become French citizens and thus, upon reaching adulthood, would be sent to front in case of war.

His grandfather, Robert Maugham, was at one time a famous lawyer, one of the co-organizers of the English Law Society. Both William Maugham's grandfather and father predicted his fate as a lawyer. Although William Maugham himself did not become a lawyer, his elder brother Frederick, later Viscount Maugham, enjoyed a legal career and served as Lord Chancellor (1938-1939).

As a child, Maugham spoke only French; he mastered English only after he was orphaned at the age of 10 (his mother died of consumption in February 1882, his father (Robert Ormond Maugham) died of stomach cancer in June 1884) and was sent to relatives in The English town of Whitstable in Kent, six miles from Canterbury.

Upon arrival in England, Maugham began to stutter - this remained for the rest of his life.

“I was short; hardy, but not physically strong; I stuttered, was shy and in poor health. I had no inclination for sport, which occupies such an important place in English life; and - either for one of these reasons, or from birth - I instinctively avoided people, which prevented me from getting along with them,” he said.

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 composer Meyerbeer (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 to prevent it from withdrawing from the war. Arrived there by ship from the USA, to Vladivostok. He was in Petrograd from August to November 1917, meeting several times with Alexander Kerensky, Boris Savinkov and other political figures. Left Russia due to the failure of his mission (October Revolution) through Sweden.

The intelligence officer’s work was reflected in the collection of 14 short stories “Ashenden, or the British Agent” (1928, Russian translations - 1929 and 1992).

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” (19159), an almost autobiographical novel, “The Moon and the Penny,” “Pies and Beer” (1930), “Theater” (1937), “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.

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 and the writer's home for the rest of his life. Winston Churchill sometimes visited the writer, and occasionally Soviet writers were there. 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 of 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 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 left me. I accepted the world as it is. I have learned tolerance. I wanted freedom for myself and was ready to give it to others.” After 1948, Maugham left drama and fiction, writing essays mainly on literary topics.

The last lifetime publication of Maugham’s work, autobiographical notes “A Look into the Past,” was published in the fall of 1962 in the pages of the London Sunday Express.

Personal life of Somerset Maugham:

Without repressing his bisexuality, in May 1917 Maugham married decorator Siri Wellcome, with whom they had a daughter, Mary Elizabeth Maugham.

The marriage was not successful, and the couple divorced in 1929. In his old age, Somerset admitted: “My biggest mistake was that I imagined myself three-quarters normal and only a quarter homosexual, when in reality it was the other way around.”

Interesting facts about Somerset Maugham:

Dying, he said: “Dying is a boring and joyless thing. My advice to you is never do this.”

“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.”

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; 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.”

Novels by Somerset Maugham:

"Liza of Lambeth"
"The Making of a Saint"
"The Hero"
"Mrs Craddock"
"Carousel" (The Merry-go-round)
"The Bishop's Apron"
"The Conqueror of Africa" (The Explorer)
"The Magician"
"Of Human Bondage"
"The Moon and Sixpence"
"The Painted Veil"
“Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard”
"The Narrow Corner"
"Theatre"
"Christmas Holiday"
"Villa on the Hill" (Up at the Villa)
"The Hour Before Dawn"
"The Razor's Edge"
“Then and now. A Novel about Niccolò Machiavelli" (Then and Now)
“Catalina” (Catalina, 1948; Russian translation 1988 - A. Afinogenova)

Somerset Maugham. William Somerset Maugham - short biography

Writer's Awards

Bibliography

B the time of human passions

Acts from life

Quotes and aphorisms