[Maugham wrote] novels about the kind of English society he knew best, doctors, the clergy, the military, the lawyers, and the formidable womenfolk who ruled their servants and their husbands with rods of iron: the good people who were the traditional fodder of the English novelist. (p. 35)

The main novels in which we find Maugham's anatomy of Edwardian England and its values are The Hero (1901), Mrs. Craddock (1902), The Merry-Go-Round (1904) and The Explorer (1909). All of them have at their centres situations in which the English gentleman finds his code of conduct woefully inadequate in dealing with the realities of life and in which he arrives through crisis at a painful maturity. (pp. 35-6)

The Hero (1901) is an early landmark in Maugham. It is his first sustained attack on contemporary middle-class values from within the framework of English society and it shows his remarkable ability among his countrymen to mount the attack in a spirit of truly Gallic concentration. (p. 39)

At this stage in his career Maugham did not have the self-confidence to appear in his own books in person; when he needed a reasoner to enunciate the truths of which the antagonists seemed unaware he used Miss Ley. She became the axle of his next book The Merry-Go-Round (1904) in which he tried the experiment of linking together dramas involving separate sets of people. (p. 42)

The Explorer contains patches of crude prentice work but it does show Maugham getting to grips for the first time with an individual of mythical potency, his relation to society and to the current morality. Alec is the first portrait in Maugham's gallery of exceptional individuals that will include such different kinds of people as Oliver Haddo, Charles Strickland and Larry Darrell. (p. 48)

Maugham's determination to storm the fortress of the theatre was unwavering throughout his twenties. Behind his persistence at writing fiction lay the hope that a reputation as a novelist would ease the way for acceptance of his plays. (p. 49)

[Shipwrecked] contains the seeds of ideas that were to flower theatrically from his pen over the next decade…. Urbane conversation floating along above a ground-swell of sex and money, culminating in doing your own thing, putting pleasure and inclination before honour and duty, these are the ingredients with which Maugham would flavour some of his most famous dishes. (p. 50)

In after years Maugham liked to give the impression that after so much [early] rejection he had turned himself into a sort of play-making computer, feeding into the programme all the elements required for a fashionable success: epigrams, an adventuress with a heart of gold, blackmail, and a touch of brogue. There is slightly more to [his first successful play, Lady Frederick (1908)], and those that followed it, than that. Maugham has found his own way of distilling the essence of that over-fed, exclusive, insolvent, elegantly covertly libidinous Edwardian society….

Society was still exclusive but because of its insolvency it was beginning to have to relax some of the qualifications required for membership and it is this process, threatening a widening of the ranks, which is what Maugham's early Society comedies are about. (p. 62)

[His next two comedies, Jack Straw and Mrs. Dot, both written in 1908,] show Maugham enlarging his satirical portrait of Edwardian society by caricaturing the different elements of which that society was composed—minor foreign royalty, impoverished peers …, exploited and insolent servants. They were all like so many coloured balls juggled about by Maugham with dazzling aplomb around the career of the adventurer hero/heroine who is the rude shock that brings them all momentarily to their senses. The plays have as much permanence as … clouds of cigar smoke…. (p. 64)

[With Penelope (1912) and Smith (1909) we are] unmistakably into the twentieth century even if human beings are still subject to the same laws of pique and pride, avarice and snobbery, that they were in the latter days of the nineteenth; if anything they have got meaner and more petty and lost much of the preposterous grandeur of the Edwardian fantasticks. What has not changed at all is the play-wright's skill in moulding his work around a single starring role without sacrificing opportunities for the other characters to make their marks. Indeed with each fresh play Maugham's stagecraft grows more assured, his construction neater and happier. (pp. 69-70)

In Penelope and Smith Maugham had at last found his own tone, his place in the tradition of artificial comedy in the English theatre reaching back through the Restoration playwrights to Beatrice and Benedick, Katherine and Petruchio. The main concern was to expose the nature of marriage to its audience, marriage à la mode; and latterly it was always trying and nearly always failing to do this with the style and elegance and symmetry of the French. (p. 73)

[In 1911] Maugham put away his cap and bells for the moment, and resumed his more private persona as a novelist…. He was to become one of the small band of writers in English who have contributed significantly to both the novel and the drama. (pp. 75-6)

A novel in which the hero is really a portrait of the author may be read in different ways at different times. The first readers read it for the story, later ones for the autobiography. Maugham succeeded in Of Human Bondage [1915] in integrating the two aspects to a point where they are almost inseparable. He avoids mere self-indulgent reminiscence by the rigour of his narrative method. He uses the straightforward 'biographical' approach of the great Victorian novelists but with the advantage of shorter chapters and freedom from the exigencies of serial or part publication. The movement of the book is classically linear without flashbacks or short-cuts…. [Throughout, Philip Carey's] life is viewed as a chronological sequence of actions each of which has its own dramatic development. It is the donnée of orphanhood that gives a peculiarly mid-Victorian air to the whole operation. (p. 76)

[Of Human Bondage] is itself a most illuminating retrospective one-man show; as we patiently wander through its rooms absorbing one rich full canvas after another we take in an unforgettable series of impressions of what life was like at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. (pp. 88-9)

In his plays even more than his novels Maugham had a journalist's eye for good copy and many of them have their origin in some passing mood which they preserve with great zest. Maugham dismissed their chances of survival with a wave of the hand, saying that he regarded the prose drama as 'hardly less ephemeral than yesterday's newspaper'. It is my purpose to suggest that Maugham was an even better dramatist than he was a journalist and that working from his own urbane vantage point within the tradition of Ibsen and Becque he succeeded in dramatizing some of the more significant social tensions of English life in the period between the wars. (p. 115)

If Maugham had shocking views about women, particularly … [regarding the] mistake it was for an artist, or anyone who wished to lead the creative life, to become involved with them, this misogynistic attitude was combined with the most remarkable empathy with the sex. Maugham understood women much better than any other playwright of this period whether it was women of the political and social aristocracy, the wives of the professional middle-class or the common prostitute. He understood them much better than Shaw, for example, who merely created new stereotypes of his own by giving women many of the qualities of leadership and resourcefulness traditionally ascribed to men. Shaw devoted a lot of wordage in his polemical plays to the plight of women and led the crusade for their liberation from the domestic prison but it was Maugham who dramatized the actual reality of their situation at the time when they achieved their political and social independence. (p. 116)

In the mordant, scabrous play … Our Betters, Maugham turned to the society marriage market at its most sordid, a world where grotesque and formidable American millionairesses married into the effete European aristocracy and used their wealth to further their social ambitions. It is a corruscating caricature of the world of Henry James…. (p. 120)

[In Caesar's Wife (1919) Maugham] wanted to show the nobility of character in both men and women that had been so conspicuously absent from his theatre up to now and to rebut the view that he only achieved his triumphs by putting thoroughly unpleasant people on the stage. If marriage was a prison, the sentence could be served with dignity…. At the risk of displeasing some critics who found the play slow-moving … Maugham succeeds in sustaining [a delightful tone] in Caesar's Wife. (p. 123)

It is hard to think of two works that better illuminate the mood of the ugly 'thirties in Britain than For Services Rendered [1932] and Sheppey [1933] with which the master left the table. If up to now he had shown us women who asserted the supremacy of their wills in affluent drawing-rooms he turned in these plays to paint a picture of women trapped in a social enclave where once again he who pays the piper calls the tune. For Services Rendered is a perfect illustration of Maugham's favourite doctrine that suffering does not ennoble but makes people bitter and ungenerous. (p. 133)

Watching the plays of his younger contemporaries Maugham began to feel his age. The clipped conversational staccato of Coward's dialogue made his seem almost ornate in its insistence on completed sentences. His characters had often behaved in a manner that was deliberately shocking but the behaviour of the new generation he found beyond any conceivable threshold of shock. Under such conditions comedy became impossible [and, after Sheppey, Maugham retired from the theatre]. (p. 137)

Cakes and Ale [1930] is an essentially humorous novel, the humour being of a peculiarly inbred kind. It belongs to the tradition of fiction about the profession of letters…. (p. 142)

[In this work, Maugham] uses his new Proustian freedom to modulate not only between past and present, innocence and experience, but also between London and Whitstable. In both places the same social configurations, the same class prejudices and snobbish taboos, that were, as we have seen, such a feature of Maugham's early work, remain; and the idea that somehow subsumed them all, that of the conduct proper to a gentleman, provides Maugham with his motivation once again. 'Gentleman' is the key-word in [Cakes and Ale] and the one which, admirers of it will remember, it so brilliantly ends. (p. 143)

Cakes and Ale is one of the wisest, wittiest and wickedest books ever written about authorship. (p. 149)

[Wherever] he went in East or West Maugham spent a great deal of his life prying into 'the dark and unsavoury places which exist all the world over', particularly those within the hearts of middle-class English men and women. For him Malaya and Borneo and the South Seas were arenas in which to observe people's characters determining their destiny; for him as for Kipling and Conrad the isolated Outstation was a Great Good Place where the real man emerged. (pp. 154-55)

[But the] fact that in so many of [his South Sea] stories degeneration begins through sexual contact with women of the native population, or through an attempt to defy the rigid paternalistic code of the white ruling administration, is not likely to endear Maugham to the modern liberal-minded reader. (p. 158)

[One of Maugham's limitations, to which he freely admitted, is that he] was capable of identifying only with the ruling caste…. He does not grant his native characters fictional parity of esteem with his white ones: they are either sinister, shadowy figures in the background … or they are mere agents of the white man's degeneration with occult powers to help them sometimes. (p. 159)

[The Painted Veil (1925) and The Narrow Corner (1933)] combine an atmosphere of fairy-tale remoteness, an Arabian Nights sense of enchantment, with a highly sensational love story and much pondering on the question of how ought one to live.

The Painted Veil is the more popular of the two in that it is an enthralling book to read in which all the contradictory Maugham ingredients—romance and realism, cynicism and hero-worship, repartee and purple patches, bedroom farce and exotic description—all somehow jell together as the enthralled reader is carried breathlessly along from one mood to another, watching what nowadays we might call a search for authentic existence. (pp. 165-66)

The book has more organic development than any other Maugham novel with a heroine [Kitty] at its centre; and he is skilful at showing the stabbing sequence of self-revelations that she has to suffer in the plague town…. But it is only when she goes to visit the convent of French nuns in the middle of the city, in the poorest district, that Kitty arrives at a more positive notion of how to live through the example of the nuns themselves, creatures of tireless work and dedication. (p. 167)

[The Narrow Corner] has the same essential structure of a journey to the interior, to the place of revelation as The Painted Veil, only here that place is a volcanic island of the Dutch East Indies…. Maugham sometimes liked to pretend that he had no gift for descriptive writing but he never succeeded better in portraying a genius loci; it is a peculiar combination of derelict grandeur and seedy charm. (p. 171)

[The Narrow Corner] can be read as a straightforward, exotic thriller full of suspense and atmosphere and unpredictability, but it can also be appreciated on a completely different level, where you need C. G. Jung at your elbow. It is in his stories of the Far East that we find the richest sub-text in Maugham's work, and where we may watch him trying to break out of the confines of realism. (p. 174)

If in the last analysis we put Maugham, mindful of his great gifts as a story-teller and the huge body of work he produced, none of which falls below a high level of excellence, in a class just below that of the greatest international masters of the art, it is because of the ubiquitous presence of himself and the partial view of human possibility that he imposes on his material. (p. 193)

Maugham was in his mid-sixties when he published The Summing Up [1939]. He was at the height of his powers and ready to stake his claim as a serious writer. Rightly or wrongly he was conscious of never having read a just assessment of himself from the critics. In a quiet, even-tempered, modest yet authoritative tone he offers a self-assessment. It is a masterpiece of a kind rare in English, a self-portrait that contains an investigation of literature as a craft whose principles may be formulated and argued about…. [With] more than forty years of published work behind him, he was ready to take the reader into his confidence, and to tell him about the trials and tribulations as well as the rewards and joys of the trade. (p. 207)

[With Strictly Personal (1942), Maugham] had cleared his desk of wartime chores, [and now] had the time and space to work at the long novel that was to contain his most mature thoughts about life, and to be the last triumphant example of his technique of story-telling. (p. 222)

[It is with a respectful and admiring manner that] Maugham mediates through the mouth of Larry some of the chief tenets of Vedanta with its wholly different view of evil from that of Christianity…. [The Razor's Edge (1944)] is Maugham's most ambitious attempt to enhance the narrative structure of a fiction something more positive and lasting than the pleasure the working out of its pattern gives to the reader. It is not that Maugham himself has actually been wholly converted to the faith his hero describes, as Isherwood was; Maugham remained as he said at the end of his life 'a rationalist', but he felt that no picture of contemporary life such as he aimed to present in The Razor's Edge could be complete without including it among the possibilities. Maugham's position is as always that of an artist, not an apologist…. (p. 229)

It is a common phenomena for the novelist who has excelled in the realistic depiction of contemporary life to seek a kind of creative sanctuary in a work of historical fiction at the end of his career…. [The] last novels of Maugham's [Then and Now (1946) and Catalina (1948)] are best seen as part of his vagrant mood, his wanderings in history and literature and resuscitation of real people who had played some exceptional part in their periods…. (p. 231)

[It is Maugham as essayist], applying his fine, shrewd, commonsensical mind to people and to books, that we are able to enjoy in the main work he did after the war, the essays that were collected in such volumes as Ten Novelists and Their Novels (1945), The Writer's Point of View (1951), The Vagrant Mood (1952), Points of View (1958) and … A Writer's Notebook (1949)…. (pp. 236-37)

Few novelists have written about the art of fiction, and those who practise it, with such penetration. He examined his close contemporaries and his illustrious predecessors in the same spirit of judicial aloofness; they have their pretensions stripped away, their virtues exposed with a surgical exactitude…. He is wickedly, brilliantly funny about his friends, and generous with his encomiums for those aspects of their work that he genuinely admires. (p. 237)

Maugham's concern [in many of his essays] is to seek confirmation in the work of the masters, that the sole purpose of the novel is to give pleasure, and that the reader is under no obligation to read any book or part of a book that fails to please…. Maugham is unwilling to recognize that he has lived through a period when the art of the novel changed radically to include some highly elusive areas of consciousness. He refused to recognize what had happened on what Edmund Wilson called 'the higher ground'…. (p. 243)

For the most part the essays in The Vagrant Mood and Points of View successfully extend Maugham's range as an essayist from fiction into other major areas of his interests, such as art, history, mysticism, prose-style, diary-keeping, travel-writing, orphanhood, English social life, the Established Church. (p. 245)

Maugham seems throughout these essays to be making the point that unnatural behaviour, even to the extent of betraying the confidence of those closest to them, is not uncommon in people of exceptional gifts. (p. 247)

In his beautiful essay on Zurbaran [Maugham] describes how the painter went to imaginero to learn his trade. The word means here a carver of religious images, but we need some such term in English to describe the kind of writer Maugham was. Certainly other writers will go to him to learn their trade, however far they may aspire beyond realism to the higher ground. He made images of a palpable kind; solid, strongly-carved, striking images, around which crowds clustered and stared, in which the people saw some illumination of life as they had experienced it. His plain, lucid, honest prose, even at its most bare, never fails to serve his purpose: to lead one into a situation of perennial human interest. (pp. 254-55)

Anthony Curtis, in his The Pattern of Maugham: A Critical Portrait (copyright © 1974 by Anthony Curtis; published by Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc., New York; in Canada by Hamish Hamilton Ltd., London; reprinted by permission) Taplinger, 1974, Hamish Hamilton, 1974, 278 p.