by Selina Hastings
Random House, 626 pages, $35
Over the course of a literary career that spanned an astonishing eight decades, Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) wrote some of the 20th century's best-loved novels (e.g., "Of Human Bondage"), a cluster of hit plays in London's West End ("The Constant Wife"), ground-breaking travel books ("The Gentleman in the Parlour," about Southeast Asia), an eloquent intellectual memoir ("The Summing Up"), and some of the finest short stories in the English language ("The Letter," "Rain," "The Outstation"). Such was his success as a writer that, in his later years, he became almost as well known for his opulent manner of living as for his work.
The book is given a generally positive review.
In "The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham," Ms. Hastings draws on thorough research and recently released documents to trace Maugham's busy life—his stormy marriage, his attentiveness to his daughter, Liza, his world-wide travels, his literary quarrels, his generosity to younger writers, his often furtive homosexuality—but she also pays a great deal of attention to his literary output, where the emphasis belongs. It irked Maugham, she says, that Bloomsbury and other highbrow literary circles tended to dismiss him or ignore him altogether.
"As much as his middlebrow reputation," Ms. Hastings writes, "it was his success, and the affluence that came with that success, that in the eyes of Bloomsbury placed him beyond the pale." Maugham himself characterized his position on more than one occasion: "I know just where I stand, in the very front row of the second rate." Ms. Hastings ranks Maugham rather higher than that.
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