Read More Than Respected

By MARTIN RUBIN

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.

Thus, for some, Maugham will forever be identified with his legendary home on the French Riviera, between Monte Carlo and Nice. As Selina Hastings declares with characteristic panache: "The Villa Mauresque and Somerset Maugham, Somerset Maugham and the Villa Mauresque: for nearly forty years the two were inextricably linked, the house the richest thread in the fabric of the legend, visited, photographed, filmed, described in countless articles, regarded with awe as the glamorous and exotic backdrop for one of the most famous writers in the world."

Famous, yes. But respected? 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. She singles out his ability to create in-depth portraits of both men and women, fully realized in all their fragility, ruthlessness, fury, confusion and longing—characters often conveyed to the reader through the fluent words of an ironical, sympathetic and knowing narrator. Cyril Connolly, the English critic, hailed Maugham as "the last of the great professional writers," someone who took pains to construct his stories properly and get his sentences right.

It was precisely such studied professionalism that seemed to put Maugham at odds with the modernist vogue, with its experimental forms, its language games, its emphasis on the purely aesthetic. And yet in 1934 Desmond McCarthy—a member of the modernist- leaning Bloomsbury set—wrote a perceptive pamphlet about Maugham arguing that "he has a sense of what is widely interesting, because, like Maupassant, he is as much a man of the world as he is an artist."

A man of the world indeed, not least of the Far East and the Malayan archipelago to which he traveled so often. Its rubber plantations, colonial outposts and local clubs, Ms. Hastings notes, serve as the settings for many of his best-known stories. These stories, she writes, "of incest and adultery, of sex-starved missionaries and alcoholic planters, of footsteps in the jungle and murder on the veranda, are what remains in the minds of many as the very image and epitome of Maugham's fictional territory."

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Maugham has been the object of biographical attention before, of course, but "The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham" (despite its needlessly salacious title) is in a class of its own. Anyone who has read Ms. Hastings's biographies of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford will know that she writes beautifully and has a talent for shaping a narrative; she is also adept at combining sympathy for her subjects with a tough-minded sense of their less pleasant traits and actions.

In Maugham those traits were far from hidden. His wit easily turned acrid and cruel and was deployed against family and friends alike. He said of his wife, Syrie, whom he divorced in 1929, that she had made his life "utter hell," "[opening] her mouth as wide as a brothel door" in her money demands. His late memoir, "Looking Back" (1962), made her out to be wanton: The child she bore, he claimed (falsely), was not really his. It is clear from Ms. Hasting's account that, despite his polished manners, he was a man profoundly antinomian in his beliefs and in certain aspects of his life.

Among the new material released by Maugham's estate is a long interview given to a family friend by Liza before her death in 1999. Liza says there that her mother was very much in love with Maugham, despite their bouts of anger, and remained friendly with him, at times, after the divorce. It had hurt her mother tremendously that the marriage ended because of Maugham's affections for a man (Gerald Haxton) and not a woman.

Mr. Hastings attributes Maugham's guarded and secretive attitude toward his homosexuality to the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde when he was young medical student in London already struggling with his sexual identity. While accepting that he was predominantly homosexual in his make-up, Ms. Hastings never reads that fact into his work or limits his achievement to that of a "gay writer" as such. Maugham was extraordinarily perceptive about the lives of women and the ordeals of their romantic lives. His enjoyment of sex with women was enthusiastic, Ms. Hastings says, and it is notable that the women who come off best in his fiction are those who are free both in their expression of sexuality and in their practice of it. In this way and many others, Ms. Hastings's uncommonly absorbing and judicious biography allows us to see the writer in full. It is the first truly rounded portrait of a fine writer and a complicated man.

Mr. Rubin is a writer in Pasadena, Calif.