Somerset Maugham

From Philosopedia.org

Maugham, William Somerset (25 January 1874– 16 December 1965)

Maugham, an expert storyteller and a master of fictional technique, was born in Pars inside the British Embassy, spoke French until he was orphaned at ten - his mother died of consumption, his father of cancer - and was sent to England to live with his uncle, a stern vicar of Whitstable. Destined to be a lawyer like his English solicitor father Robert Ormond Maugham, who was of Irish ancesty, Maugham was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and Heidelbert University, then trained in London and became qualified as a physician. However, he never practiced medicine but said his training convinced him there is no God. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), drew upon his having attended women in childbirth.

Maugham (pronounced môm) wrote seventy-eight books and many plays, becoming in the 1930s the highest paid author in the world.

In 1917, at the age of 40 and disguised as a reporter, Maugham worked for British Intelligence in Russia. It was difficult because he was only 5' 6" and a stutterer, and he did not pursue that career. However, his Ashenden, Or the British Agent (1928) became one of the first such spy stories by any author.

Of Human Bondage (1915) describes some of the bondages in life that a person with a clubfoot has - Maugham was a stammerer who empathized with such problems. The plot involves a medical student, Philip Carey, who becomes passionate about an unfaithful and selfish waitress, Mildred Rogers, who makes fun of him, betrays him, then abandons him. Again hoping to satisfy his passions, he turns to Sally Athelney, whose possibly pregnancy leads to their deciding to marry. She then finds she is not pregnant, but he chooses to marry her anyway. Philip's emotional ups and downs lead him in a painful way to question life's very meanings. Having been born into a particular organized religion was of no help in finding answers, which any rationalist would say is an example of why the book is so universally profound. Maugham finds, for example,

• A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and he has a very lively sustaining faith in he doesn’t quite know what.

The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is based on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin. Asked what the title meant, Maugham explained,

• People tell me it’s a good title but they don’t know what it means. It means reaching for the moon and missing the sixpence at one’s feet.

"Rain," a short story in the collection called The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), shocked many because it told about a sexually repressed missionary and a prostitute, Sadie Thompson, who were fellow passengers on a trip he made to Pago Pago. The story ends with the missionary's suicide.

Maugham wrote with wit and irony, frequently showing a resigned agnosticism combined with a cynical attitude toward life. Summing Up (1939) includes the following:

• The arguments for immortality, weak when you take them one by one, are no more cogent when you take them together. . . . For my part, I cannot see how consciousness can persist when its physical basis has been destroyed, and I am too sure of the interconnection of my body and my mind to think that any survival of my consciousness apart from my body would be in any sense a survival of myself. . . . It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.
• After discussing religion, he declared “I remain an Agnostic.”

The semi-mystical Razor’s Edge (1943) is a humanistic account, one that deals with Laurence Darrell, a young American, and his search for “spiritual” fulfillment. Darrell, it could be argued, is the leading fictional proponent of humanistic naturalism. In his search for truths, not Truth, he found,

• I wanted to believe, but I couldn’t believe in a God who wasn’t better than the ordinary decent man.

He further comes to doubt all the basic tenets of Christian theology; is not satisfied with theologians’ answers to his question that, if an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did he create evil; and finds interesting the Katha-Upanishad’s statement, “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.” Any rationalist will understand the feeling that Darrell experiences when in India he at last senses why he needs neither a nirvana nor a heaven:the sharp edge of reason had shown him that the ecstasy of life is not dependent upon retiring to a cloister and accepting the various theological explanations but, rather, is connected with understanding the joys of living in this world, in loving the objects of this world, “not indeed for themselves, but for the Infinite that is in them.”

Maugham had occasional homosexual experiences when young, but the Oscar Wilde trials led most at the time to remain closeted out of fear. When World War I broke out, he served with the Red Cross in France and, in 1914, met Gerald Haxton, a 22-year-old American who served in the same Red Cross unit in Flanders and who remained his companion until dying in 1944. Haxton inspired the characteer of Tony Paxton in his Our Betters.

After Maugham and Syrie Wellcome had a daughter in 1915, the two married in 1917. However, a divorce followed because Maugham was spending so much time traveling abroad with Haxton, now his secretary and companion.

Maugham is said to have believed that early nights would keep him young, and he used this as an excuse to decline certain invitations. But there is the story that at one party, when a friend encouraged him to stay a little longer, Maugham declined, saying, “I want to keep my youth.” Whereupon his bitchy friends, knowing of his bisexuality, chimed in, “Then why didn’t you bring him with you so we could meet him?” Maugham was not amused. His son’s later accounts of his own and his father’s homosexual escapades have dazzled gossips for decades. One story, told by Martin Greif, is that Maugham was injected with cells from sheep fetuses (as allegedly Merle Oberon and also Pope Pius XII had been), and “he delighted in demonstrating to uncomfortable guests his ability to achieve a rampant erection.” Another story is that on his deathbed when he was 91, the elder Maugham grabbed Alan Searle’s hand and, whispering to his lover Searle, said, “I want to shake your hand and thank you for all that you’ve done for me.” In another version, his last words were, “Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.” In 1949, in A Writer’s Notebook, Maugham wrote, “What mean and cruel things men do for the love of god.”

Two years later he wrote Warren Allen Smith concerning humanism:

• The fact is that I know nothing about the philosophy of naturalistic humanism, and so there is nothing I can say about it.

However, soon after 1951 he apparently completed some research, for he became associated with the New Humanist, a publication of the British Rationalist Press Association (RPA), of which Bertrand Russell was president. Maugham also accepted an honorary associateship from the Rationalist Press Association.

Maugham at the age of ninety-one died in Nice. Philosopher A. J. Ayer visited him during his final days, during which time Ayer reassured him that there is no life after death, a view Maugham long had held.

{CE; CL; GL; JM; RE; TYD; WAS, 24 March 1951}