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William Somerset Maugham
From Outcyclopedia, the free and queer encyclopedia. William Somerset Maugham (January 25, 1874 - December 16, 1965) was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. Maugham wrote comedies, psychological novels and spy stories (although the latter part of his work is hardly ever seen as belonging to crime fiction proper). Duirng the 1930s, Maugham was the highest paid author in the world Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, an autobiographical novel which deals with the life of Philip Carey, who, like Maugham, was orphaned and brought up by his pious uncle. Maugham's severe stutter has been replaced by Philip's clubfoot. Among his short stories, some of the most memorable are those dealing with the lives of western, mostly British, colonists in the Far East. The stories are typically concerned with the emotional toll exacted on the colonists by their isolation. Maugham's restrained prose allows him to explore the resulting tensions and passions without descending into melodrama. Maugham was born in Paris at the British Embassy, where his father served as a solicitor. He spent most of his childhood in Paris, learning to speak French before English. When Maugham was eleven his parents died and he grew up in Whitstable, England at the home of his uncle, a vicar. As a young am he studied towards a career in medicine at first King's College Canterbury and later Heidelberg University. Maugham had his first homosexual experiences in college as well, courtesy of John Ellingham Brooks. Though he qualified to practice medicine, Maugham left this career to write full time after his first published works proved successful. For a time, he worked as a journalist in Russia during that country's 1917 revolution, while also gathering and relaying information for British Intelligence. Maugham is often credited with creating the modern spy story with his novel, Ashenden; or the British Agent (1928), which was based on his own experiences. In 1917, in New Jersey, Maugham married his mistress, Maud Gwendolen Syrie Barnardo, a daughter of orphanage founder Dr. Thomas Barnardo and former wife of American-born English pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome. (She became celebrated as Syrie Maugham, a noted interior decorator who popularized the all-white room in the 1920s.) They had one daughter, Elizabeth Mary Maugham (a.k.a. Liza) (1915 - 1998). The Maughams divorced in 1928 after a tempestuous marriage that was complicated by William's gay relationship with his secretary Gerald Haxton. Maugham and Haxton had first met in 1914 in Flanders, where Maugham was serving as a surgeon and Haxton was an ambulance driver with the Red Cross. When Haxton was deported from Britain as an undesirable alien, Maugham went to live with him in a villa in France, leaving Syrie and Liza behind. Although the nature of their relationship was hard to conceal, Maugham never spoke of it openly except as a close friendship. It was during Maugham's college years that the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde occured. The incident caused Maugham, and indeed most men of his generation, to be extremely closeted about their homosexuality. As Martin Grief quotes him in The Gay Book of Days: I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only one quarter of me was queer - whereas really it was the other way round.Many biographers agree that the lonely bitterness in which Maugham spent his last years was due to his inability to live openly as a gay man. The character of Sir Hugo Latymer in Noël Coward's A Song at Twilight is generally believed to be based on Maugham, while that of Perry Sheldon is based on Haxton. Mortimer Quinn, the homosexual novelist in Coward's Point Valaine, is also based on Maugham, and Coward in fact dedicated the play to him. Maugham lived with Haxton at their home, Villa Mauresque, receiving such varied luminaries as Cecil Beaton, Ruth Gordon, Winston Churchill, and Ian Fleming. When war broke out in 1939, Maugham fled to the US, developing an interest in mysticism. Haxton, an alcoholic, died in New York in 1944. Maugham returned to Villa Mauresque in 1946, living there with Alan Searle. In 1947 he instituted the Somerset Maugham Award, still given to this day to the best writer or writers under the age of thirty-five of a work of fiction published in the past year. Somerset Maugham died in Nice, France on December 16, 1965. Maugham was the uncle of Robin Maugham, ne Robert Cecil Romer Maugham, 2nd Viscount Maugham of Hartfield, a writer of note in his own right. More openly gay than his uncle, Robin made many claims about his relationship with the elder Maugham and Gerald Haxton. Most biographers and critics question the veracity of these claims. Selected Bibliography
Short story collectionsSomerset Maugham edited and finished the autobiography of the Victorian actor Sir Charles Hawtrey (1858- 1923), called "The Truth at Last", which was posthumously published in 1924. Maugham on film
External links: W. Somerset Maugham at the Free Library Entry added 24 January, 2005. This article uses material from the Wikipedia article, "William Somserset Maughm." All text is available for use under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (see Copyrights for details). DISCLAIMER: This is not an adult site, and does not contain any pornographic images or material. Any references to sex or other adult material or behavior is made from a purely academic standpoint. Images used on this site are credited whenever possible, and any whose copyright status is in dispute will be gladly removed or credited upon request. Not all persons listed on this site are or were openly homosexual, but reasonable conclusions about their sexuality may and has been made from diaries, letters, and other writings and accounts made by them and/or those who knew them. Several others are heterosexual and are included here for the impact, whether positive or negative, they have made on queer culture and history. |
