W. Somerset Maugham Analysis

W. Somerset Maugham was a celebrated writer of novels and short stories. In addition, he published ten important books of travel, autobiography, criticism, and miscellaneous essays. He was a constant contributor to periodicals, and he furnished prefaces, stories, and chapters to more than two dozen anthologies and books by other writers. Many of his works have been translated into foreign languages.

Maugham’s novels began with a story of London slum life, Liza of Lambeth (1897), and closed with Catalina: A Romance (1948), a love story of no great importance. Of the eighteen novels published between these two, at least five are of major importance: Mrs. Craddock (1902), Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Cakes and Ale (1930), and The Razor’s Edge (1944).

Of the collections of short stories, only the three volumes of The Complete Short Stories (1951) need be mentioned here. The publishing history of the individual stories is extremely intricate. An excellent detailing is provided in Raymond Toole Stott’s Maughamiana: The Writings of W. Somerset Maugham (1950). Stott traces the publishing history of Maugham’s short stories from “Don Sebastian,” which appeared in Cosmopolis magazine in October, 1898, through the publication of “Mr. Know-All” in the April 16, 1949, issue of Everybody’s Weekly. Of special value is Stott’s tracing of the stories that appeared in Nash’s Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Hearst’s International Magazine, and Good Housekeeping from November, 1920, to March, 1947. Maugham’s stories that were written in French and published in three French periodicals receive separate treatment.

Maugham’s travel books include The Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia (1905), On a Chinese Screen (1922), The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong (1930), and Don Fernando (1935). Literary criticism and autobiography are curiously mixed in The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer’s Notebook (1949), later printed together as The Partial View (1954). The autobiographical Strictly Personal (1941) details Maugham’s flight from France in World War II. The Writer’s Point of View (1951) is a lecture to aspiring writers delivered to the National Book League in London. Other essays and criticism are to be found in The Vagrant Mood: Six Essays (1952), Ten Novels and Their Authors (1954), and Points of View (1958). All these books may be said to be both frank and secretive. In his works, Maugham expresses himself freely on many public and some private subjects, but he guards his innermost privacy carefully.

That W. Somerset Maugham was one of the more successful English writers of the first half of the twentieth century is clear enough, even though the fact is sometimes obscured by that preliminary rising and falling of popular and academic estimation that accompanies the settling of a writer into his place in history. Early criticism tended to portray Maugham’s plays as cynical, shallow, and witty, after the manner of Restoration comedy and of Oscar Wilde. Appreciation of Maugham’s broader and more serious themes—poverty, social injustice, the possibilities inherent in the relationships between the sexes, privilege versus responsibility, and the ultimate nature of human good and evil—has emerged gradually over three-quarters of a century and has established that Maugham the playwright was a thoughtful observer and critic of life.

Maugham’s reputation as a serious dramatist seems likely to continue growing as scholars and critics reconsider his plays, and the success of revivals indicates that at least some of the plays will be part of the living repertoire of English drama for some time to come.

A dedicated professional, W. Somerset Maugham earned more than three million dollars from his writing, a phenomenal amount for his day. Between 1897 and 1962, a career spanning eight decades, Maugham published twenty novels, four travel books, more than twenty stage plays, an autobiography of ideas, and innumerable essays, belles-lettres, and introductions, in addition to more than one hundred short stories, of which about ninety are readily accessible in different editions. Much of his work has been adapted for use by television and cinema.

W. Somerset Maugham is best known for his urbanity, his wit, his controlled sense of writing, and his ability to describe not only objectively but also so realistically that he has been accused of lifting stories directly from life. Many of his stories do spring from real incidents or actual people, but the perceptions and surprise plot twists are always Maugham-inspired. In fact, Maugham is expressly known as a master of the surprise or twist ending to an inextricably woven plot in his short stories, many of which have been converted to film. His early work, under the influence of Oscar Wilde and his cult of aesthetes, shows a refined and civilized attitude toward life. Several of his novels illustrate the demanding sacrifices that art necessitates of life or that life itself can become, in turn, an art form, thereby demonstrating the “art of living” (The Razor’s Edge, 1944).

Maugham was curiously denied many conspicuous honors (such as knighthood) usually conferred on a man of letters of his distinction, but he was awarded by the Royal Society of Literature the title of Companion of Literature, an honor given to “authors who have brought exceptional distinction to English letters.” Furthermore, the occasion of his eightieth birthday was celebrated with a dinner at the Garrick Club, a distinction given to only three writers before him: Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope.

A professional man of letters whose work spanned more than six decades, W. Somerset Maugham (mawm) published in a wide range of literary forms, the significant exception being poetry. He first won success, fame, and wealth in the theater; his most acclaimed dramas were performed on the London stage during the first three decades of the twentieth century. He produced more than a hundred short stories, largely written during the period from 1921 to 1950; his collected short stories include four of the best-known stories of the twentieth century: “Rain,” “The Outstation,” “The Letter,” and “The Colonel’s Lady.” Fifteen or more additional volumes are devoted to autobiography, literary and aesthetic criticism, and travel. Among these, the most useful for students are The Summing Up (1938), Ten Novels and Their Authors (1954), and A Writer’s Notebook (1949).

W. Somerset Maugham’s twenty novels are exceptionally uneven; the first eight, though interesting, suggest the efforts of a young novelist to discover where his talent lies. Between the publication of Of Human Bondage in 1915 through The Razor’s Edge in 1944, he produced his most significant prose works. During this period, he was a world-famous man of letters with a following of many thousands who would buy and read anything he wrote; however, a few novels that he produced, such as Then and Now and Up at the Villa, were not in his best vein.

The novels brought Maugham acclaim and recognition both from a general audience and from the intelligentsia. Among common readers, he was perhaps the most successful English novelist of the twentieth century, and, as Samuel Johnson pointed out, the common reader is not often wrong. It must be admitted, however, that Maugham’s detractors, such as Edmund Wilson, present valid criticism: One expects a serious artist to exert an important influence, either thematic or formal, on his or her medium. The symphony was forever altered by Ludwig van Beethoven; no similar statement can be made about Maugham and the novel. He sought to tell a story with clarity and grace, to embody a set of attitudes and values, and to entertain his readers with insights into character and life.