![]() His stories teem with hypocrites, drunks, addicts, murderesses and spine-chilling passion. Maugham’s focus on values is reflected in The Summing Up, where, as set out in my earlier post, Maugham explores whether writing, alcohol, sex, art, or living in the moment is the key to a happy life. As she leaves, he says “she was a very honest woman”. Yet when the narrator meets her in her latter years, she is about to sacrifice her happiness for a much younger man, whom she loves. Her name stank in the nostrils of decent people.” ![]() That wisdom shines through in stories such as The Promise, about Lady Elizabeth Vermont, who “married at the age of eighteen a very rich man and started at once upon a career of astounding extravagance, lewdness and dissipation… her startling beauty and her scandalous conduct held her in the public eye and it was never very long but that she gave the gossips something to talk about. A man of complex sexuality, he said: “It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.” Why should you read W Somerset Maugham? Wisdom Many are about relationships, which he describes with wisdom and forgiveness. The settings, in the dying days of doomed empire, and the rich cast of washed-up and desperate characters who inhabit the stories, evoke a lost era. In the preface to his collected stories he says of the most famous, Rain: “Rain was written in 1920 in Hong Kong, but I had hit upon the idea for it during a journey I took in the South Seas during the winter of 1916.” The sins of others These experiences provide the setting for Maugham’s most famous tales. ![]() W Somerset Maugham is famous for his short stories Later he travelled widely in South East Asia, China and the Pacific. He served in the ambulance corps in the First World War before joining the Secret Intelligence Service and working in Switzerland and Russia. Born in the British Embassy in Paris in 1874, he grew up speaking French and lost both his parents by the age of ten, when he moved to England. My post about his memoirs, W Somerset Maugham on sex, turnips and the meaning of life, is one of my most visited (links in bold italics are to other posts on this blog). To say W Somerset Maugham is unfashionable is like saying that J K Rowling has sold a few books. You can listen to a podcast of this post here. ![]() Should you read W Somerset Maugham? The one-time master of the short story has fallen out of fashion. ![]()
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