The New Yorker
A plainspoken craftsman of short stories and popular novels, and a dramatist, screenwriter, and essayist, Somerset Maugham had one of the most versatile—and lucrative—careers of any literary writer of the twentieth century. He also had an eventful life; during the First World War, he served as a British agent, and his travels took him to the Far East and the South Seas, where much of his best work is set. Despite his cosmopolitan sheen and his financial success—he lived in style on the French Riviera—he suffered at the hands of critics; Edmund Wilson dismissed him as a “half-trashy novelist.” Meyers, however, mounts a persuasive defense of Maugham’s art, keenly mapping his influence on V. S. Naipaul, George Orwell, and Paul Theroux.
The Washington Post
Meyers rightly stresses Maugham's outsiderhood -- i.e., his homosexuality, his stammer, his shyness -- which prompted him to "reveal in a hundred variations his essentially tragic story." In comparing Maugham to his contemporaries, Meyers speaks with particular authority because he has written biographies of so many of them -- Conrad, Lawrence, Hemingway, Orwell, Katherine Mansfield, Edmund Wilson -- as well as a study called Homosexuality and Literature, 1890-1930. Set against this dense background, Meyers's portrait of the long-lived Maugham and his tumultuous time is both nuanced and concise, a biography without a wasted word. — Dennis Drabelle
Publishers Weekly
The long-lived and highly prolific Maugham (1874-1965) finds a sympathetic biographer in the similarly productive Meyers (George Orwell, etc.). This inveterate traveler was marked as a wanderer by his Parisian birth and early orphanhood-he journeyed from Europe and America to the South Seas and the Far East-and he was a natural for the secret service in civil war Russia. Maugham's largely unhappy existence culminated in unfulfilling luxury in exile, elusive critical approval in England and embittered misanthropy. After becoming a bestselling author and popular playwright, Maugham stayed away from England, as much to avoid its tax code as to conduct his secretive sex life away from draconian laws against homosexuality. Since Maugham preferred basing his work on real events from his travels and real people from his social circle, his biographer must provide plot summaries and decode identities. While this could be cruelly obvious, as in the reputation-wrecking portrait of the novelist Hugh Walpole in Cakes and Ale, Meyers finds a match for Of Human Bondage's Mildred in Maugham's one-time companion Harry Philips, and, in general, he diligently collates fiction and fact. While Maugham was clearly important in the literary world, Meyers's high estimation of him, compared with his rivals and betters such as Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad, is not fully convincing. Maugham's characteristically harsh but accurate verdict on his own position as "in the very first row of the second-raters" trumps Meyers's praise and reassessment, but Meyers does show how Maugham maintained, through determination as much as talent, the longest successful career in English letters. 55 photos. (Feb. 20) FYI: Vintage's reissue of The Painted Veil coincides with this biography's publication. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Meyers, the author of several literary biographies, including those of Robert Frost, Edgar Allen Poe, and George Orwell, continues his work as a prolific and respected biographer with this intimate portrait of a talented, multifaceted, and seemingly inexhaustible writer. Relying on previously unpublished material, Meyers provides new information about Somerset Maugham's upbringing, early travels, lifelong atheism (which Meyers finds particularly fascinating in an "Edwardian gentleman"), and relationships with contemporaries like Christopher Isherwood, Kingsley Amis, and H. Goebbels. In the final chapter, "Afterlife," Meyers discusses Maugham's often tepid postmortem reception by critics like Leon Edel, as well as their influence on writers like Margaret Drabble, Muriel Spark, and V.S. Naipaul. Though other biographies of Maugham are available, some by Maugham himself (including A Writer's Notebook and The Gentleman in the Parlour), Meyers's is not only the most recent but is also engrossing and very informative and should be purchased even where other biographies are available. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.-Felicity D. Walsh, Southern Polytechnic State Univ., Marietta, GA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A well-considered life of the phenomenally successful but little esteemed English writer. Pity poor W. Somerset Maugham, whose friends called him "Willie": he complained that his manicured Riviera villa and yacht were poor places to write, "out of touch with the stream of life, with people, with happenings of import." When he entered into that stream, he sometimes got himself into deep trouble, but also turned up material for stories that approached literature-Of Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge. Having achieved success early on with books that critics dismissed as potboilers, Maugham found himself outside the best literary circles; he lived to be a ripe 92, but "he developed no coterie and was sustained by no reliable faction," and was indeed most unpopular. Literary and film biographer Meyers (Inherited Risk, 2002, etc.) enumerates the reasons for Maugham's poor standing: he had a "chilling character," lived abroad to avoid paying British taxes, was openly homosexual, and "enjoyed writing and composed with great facility in an age when highly admired authors, like Joyce and Kafka, tortured themselves with creative agony." The last reason seems a little unlikely; like Stephen King and the National Book Award, after all, Maugham got his honors and his moolah too, a million dollars for the play Rain and its subsequent adaptations alone. But it finds echoes in critical assessments of the time, which accused Maugham of emotional tone-deafness and general hackishness. Meyers turns in a respectful account of Maugham, delivering a few nicely turned surprises that touch on, for instance, Maugham's service as a spy in the South Seas and early Bolshevik Russia. All that doesn't make the writer anymore likable (as Meyers quotes C.P. Snow as observing, visiting Maugham was "rather like visiting one's family lawyer"), but such moments at least make him seem more interesting. A major biography, then, of a minor figure. Agent: Curtis Brown
