How good was Maugham?

In The Summing Up, published in 1938 when he was sixty-four years old, Somerset Mangham inveighed against literary obscurity and extolled the virtue of clarity (his own peculiar forte). His sentiments were unlikely to endear him to many of the literati of the twentieth century, whose subtlety and complexity, some of them imagined, precluded clodhopping clarity. Maugham explained the source of the obscurity with which they wrote:

 
   The author wraps his meaning in mystery so 
   that the vulgar shall not participate in it. His 
   soul is a secret garden into which the elect 
   may penetrate only after overcoming a number 
   of perilous obstacles. 

This is very well said, and if its import were taken seriously halt" of contemporary literary fiction would never have been published and two-thirds of the teachers of the humanities would find themselves out of a job.

Nevertheless, there is in Maugham's astringent view the suspicion of a potential for a philistine's charter. Maugham himself could hardly be accused of philistinism: he was a discriminating collector of modern art, for example recognizing the genius of Gauguin before it was common knowledge, and he both loved and was knowledgeable about oriental art well before the taste for it became general. It is unlikely that many of the people who were condescending about him were able and willing, as he was, to read Racine in French, Calderon in Spanish, Dante in Italian, Goethe in German, and Chekhov in Russian (to say nothing of his formidable erudition in English literature). And yet one can easily imagine all the militant middlebrows of the world cheering loudly as they read The Summing Up. See, we were right all along to prefer light to heavy reading.

It is the suspicion of an underlying philistinism and shallowness that has dogged Maugham's literary reputation from the start. As Jeffery Meyers's new biography of Maugham makes clear,' he had a very interesting and varied life, far more interesting than that of most writers. His knowledge of the world was incomparable; his training as a doctor taught him about the minutiae of human suffering, while his spell as a British spy in Petrograd charged with aborting the Bolshevik revolution taught him about politics at the very highest level of world significance. He travelled extensively, fearlessly, and productively. It seems to me likely that his name will live largely because of the short stories that he wrote about the South Seas and the East Indies, which are among the best in the English language, or indeed in any language.

Meyers's biography is well written, entertaining, and of commendable brevity, compared with the two previous full biographies of The Master. I should recommend it to anyone who wanted to read about his life. There is just the right amount of psychology in it, and most of the interpretations are plausible and measured. Whether it adds much to our overall picture or appreciation of its subject, however, may be doubted. It enumerates Maugham's many homosexual liaisons much more fully than other biographies, and if this is the kind of thing you want to know, then it is to Meyers that you must now turn. Personally I could have done without the anecdote concerning Maugham's fecal incontinence when he was ninety-one years old and senile, for it is a matter of human decency and good manners to draw a veil over such frailty, unless there is some very good reason not to. Our exercise of the right to know ought sometimes to be tempered by a willingness to look away.

Maugham's personality, or persona, did little to aid his popularity among the intelligentsia. He was perceived as being stiff, formal, acidulous, snobbish, unsympathetic, sour, cynical, and misanthropic, though no one ever turned down the sumptuous hospitality offered at the Villa Mauresque on that account. This disparaging view of Maugham's character is very superficial and unimaginative, but it is the one that has prevailed.