A Master’s Touch: The Literary Legacy of Somerset Maugham

A portrait of Somerset Maugham, 1934, by Carl Van Vechten. Library of Congress. (Public Domain)

Winston Churchill and Somerset Maugham were born in the same year, 1874, and both died in 1965. Each had one foot in the Victorian age and the other in the era of automobiles, flight, motion pictures, and the Cold War. Despite their travels and cosmopolitan backgrounds, both remained distinctly English in their demeanor and speech.

Churchill’s parents, Jennie and Randolph, rarely showed their son affection, though later Jennie did prove instrumental in furthering Winston’s career. Maugham’s parents died before he turned 11, and the uncle and aunt with whom he then lived, though they offered him care, lacked the loving nature of his parents.

Both men were on the short side, about 5 feet, 6 inches tall. And both suffered from speech impediments. Churchill had a slight lisp. Even in the 1930s, he sought coaching in pronouncing the letter “s,” and Maugham in his adolescence developed a stutter that never entirely left him.

More significantly, these two men—one who would become England’s greatest prime minister, the other one of its bestselling and most popular authors—shared a love for the English language. Their prose styles and literary interests differ. Churchill is famous for the rotund, rolling sentences found in his histories and speeches, whereas in his novels and stories Maugham was noted for his trenchant clarity.

Portrait of Winston Churchill, circa 1942, sitting in an armchair. He and Somerset Maugham were contemporaries during a tumultuous time of history. (Express/Express/Getty Images)

In “The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Alone 1932–1940,” biographer William Manchester noted of Churchill that “the only modern novelist whose skills he admires” was Somerset Maugham.

A Life in Brief

Like some other writers of our literature—I am thinking here of Joseph Conrad—English was for Maugham a second language, with French his first, as he spent his boyhood in Paris where his father handled legal affairs at the British Embassy.

Back in England and living with his uncle, he attended The King’s School, Canterbury, and studied in Heidelberg, Germany, where he became proficient in that language. Then he floundered for a bit until, mostly to please his uncle, he began studying medicine in 1892 in Lambeth, England.

All this time, however, Maugham never lost his desire to become a writer. His work in Lambeth, particularly in obstetrics, introduced him to the poor, who made up the bulk of his patients, and to suffering.

From this experience came the novel “Lisa of Lambeth,” a tale of a working-class woman, which first brought him the attention of the literary set. He burnished that reputation with successful plays, all the while writing novels as well.

Published in 1915, “Of Human Bondage” cemented his reputation as a writer of fiction, bringing him acclaim and money.

During World War I, Maugham served for a time in the British Secret Service. In 1928, after years of traveling the globe (many of the places he visited became the settings for his novels and short stories), Maugham bought the Villa Mauresque on the Cote d’Azur, which became his permanent residence. After his death, his remains were interred on the grounds of The King’s School in Canterbury.

‘The Razor’s Edge’: A Second Encounter

Years ago, I tumbled into Maugham’s phase of his autobiographical meditation on life and writing—reading his novels “Cakes and Ale,” “Of Human Bondage,” “The Moon and Sixpence,” and “The Razor’s Edge,” as well as several of his short stories, and the literary memoir “The Summing Up.” Having stumbled across references to it in several books and online sites, I recently decided to revisit “The Razor’s Edge.”

Though I’d forgotten many of the details of this novel, such as the fact that Maugham appears as himself as the narrator, the general plot had remained with me, especially the role played by Larry Darrell. Following a harrowing experience as a pilot in the First World War, Darrell returns to Chicago a changed man, suffering from what we today would call post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Rather than join his group of wealthy friends in their quest to increase their fortunes and find material happiness, Darrell decides to move to Paris and live as a bohemian and a seeker of truth, though he avoids so fancy a term.

"The Razor's Edge" by Somerset Maugham presented a reflective phase in the author's life. (Public Domain)

His friends and his fiancée, Isabel, who later breaks their engagement, are mystified by what they regard as his wasted ambitions and talents. Many of these same friends find their dreams and lifestyles shattered by the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, after years of travel, reading, and doing odd jobs, Darrell finally discovers the spiritual truths he was seeking.

After closing “The Razor’s Edge,” I found, as I had before, that the greatest pleasure I received from the novel came less from the plot and characters, though these were interesting enough, and more from the power of the writing: the simple but skillfully constructed sentences, the aphorisms, the exploration of human nature. Otherwise, my stopover left little impact.

But one story inspired by Maugham did once move me profoundly.

At the Movies

Besides “The Razor’s Edge,” several of Maugham’s tales—“Of Human Bondage,” “Theatre,” and “Rain,” among others—became films.

About 15 years ago, a friend and his wife invited me to join them at Asheville’s Fine Arts Theater to watch the movie “The Painted Veil,” based on Maugham’s novel by the same name. I knew nothing of the plot and arrived with no expectations.

The film tells the story of a young, idealistic doctor, Walter, who is newly married to Kitty and who travels to Shanghai to study infectious diseases. After Kitty has an affair (her lover refuses to leave his wife), she avoids scandal and a divorce by accompanying Walter to a village suffering a cholera epidemic. Slowly, the estranged couple, while helping the sick and the children each in their own way, repair their damaged marriage.

The movie had me wiping tears from my eyes in several places, especially the scene where Walter has contracted cholera and Kitty is at his side. “The Painted Veil” was one of the few movies I’ve ever seen where, as the credits rolled at the end, I thought to myself, “I want to make the world a better place.”

Maugham’s novel is apparently different from the movie, which is why I’ve never read it. I wanted instead to keep what the film gave me, which was still a gift from Mr. Maugham.

A Master of Technique

I’ve just reread “Writing Prose,” an essay from my father’s old college literature textbook taken from Maugham’s literary autobiography, “The Summing Up.” The story has it that Maugham once humorously remarked: “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” Although in this essay he doesn’t specify three rules for writing novels, or for anything else for that matter, in the space of a few pages he does give readers wonderful advice for writing fiction and other prose pieces. Here are just a few of his observations, all of them embroidered with that crisp clarity we associate with his writing.

When he returned to novels after a period of writing plays, Maugham observes: “By then I no longer had any ambition to be a stylist; I put aside all thought of fine writing. I wanted to write without any frills of language, in as bare and unaffected a manner as I could.” Regarding some modern writers, he comments: “People often write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to learn to write clearly.”

Lucidity, simplicity, and euphony (the quality of being pleasing to the ear) are, Maugham explains, three key ingredients for good writing of any sort. He also contends that fine writing should give the effect of ease, of effortlessness on the part of the writer—which as he says, “For my part, if I get it at all, it is only by strenuous effort.”

His recommendations are gifts to everyone, from students in a high school composition class to the most experienced of writers.

The Craftsman Is Still Read Today

Perhaps it is for this craft that Maugham’s literary talents will best be remembered. In his Introduction to Maugham’s “Collected Stories,” writer Nicholas Shakespeare, who received the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1990 for his first novel, writes about the influence of Maugham on others.

Naomi Watts and Edward Norton star in the 2006 film version of "The Painted Veil," in which a couple mends their marriage. (Warner Independent Pictures)

Gabriel García Márquez, George Orwell, James Michener, and Evelyn Waugh all admired his work, with Waugh describing him as “the only living studio-master under whom one can study with profit.” In “Earthly Powers,” Anthony Burgess pays homage to Maugham, sometimes humorously so, by basing his narrator Toomey on Maugham and even having that character meet Maugham.

Unlike so many of today’s writers of fiction, Maugham did not learn his craft and storytelling in workshops or by earning a Master of Fine Arts degree. He learned it, as did most writers of his day, by studying the works of other authors and by noting carefully the peculiarities of human behavior. Many of his characters, for example, were inspired by people he’d known or met.

In his Introduction mentioned above, Nicholas Shakespeare first quotes Maugham, and then adds an afterthought: “‘To know a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses.’ Like many writers, he was not good at pure invention.”

Maugham himself always maintained a clear-eyed critical view of his own work. “I know just where I stand,” he once wrote. “In the very first row of the second-raters.”

Perhaps. Yet even today his work continues to attract admirers—readers drawn to him, I suspect, not by his technique and his wit but by his storytelling and his insights into the heart. The comments offered by them on different online sites reflect their esteem for him.

And what writer could ask for more than that?