Max Markham is the author of Indigo Bird – An Erotic Novel. For more information on the author and his work, please visit Max Markham’s Section on this website.
This article is part of a series of posts about my favorite top ten gay Englishmen.
I hesitated before including Somerset Maugham in my “top ten”, given that he appears to have been such a poisonous character. However it is not my job to be judgemental in this way. Maugham was also on occasion capable of great generosity. He was also a patriotic Englishman, albeit a scathing critic of his native country and his fellow countrymen. In both world wars, being too old to fight, and at considerable risk to himself, he served in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), where his fluency in European languages made him a valuable secret agent. Between 1939 and 1945, being “rich enough”, he refused all payment from the Government. He used his experiences during the First World War to write the William Ashenden stories, whose grim realism was far removed from the romantic spy fiction of the day. Ian Fleming and other later spy thriller writers openly admired them and in some cases plagiarised them. When Maugham submitted the corpus of Ashenden stories to MI6, they insisted that about half of them should be suppressed, as being too realistic and revelatory. Quiet and observant, Maugham had a good temperament for intelligence work; he had inherited from his lawyer father a gift for cool judgement and the ability to be undeceived by facile appearances. A shy, morose man, Maugham was nevertheless sought out and appreciated by Ian Fleming, the Duke of Windsor, Winston Churchill, Jim Thompson, Noel Coward and numerous other distinguished people.
William Somerset Maugham
Maugham belonged to an ambitious dynasty. This is usually a stressful experience and it was, in his case too. Originally of humble origin; small farmers from Maughonby in Cumbria, the Maughams advanced through the church and the law; those twin vehicles for upwardly-mobile persons. Maugham’s grandfather founded the Law Society of England and with it the modern solicitors’ profession. Maugham’s father was a distinguished lawyer, the legal adviser to the British Ambassador in Paris. Maugham’s elder brother, the future Frederic, Viscount Maugham, became a judge and Lord Chancellor of England. There was however a price to be paid for this. The family had a history of mental and physical breakdown. Maugham’s father died young; of cancer, stress and overwork. He also lost his mother very young. Two of his brothers seem to have committed suicide. His nephew Robin Maugham, the Second Viscount Maugham, died of drink, disappointment and diabetes. With his death the Maugham name became extinct.
Brought up in Paris amid comfort, the young Maugham was not best pleased, after his parents’ deaths, to be taken to live with his uncle, the Vicar of Whitstable, and sent to the King’s School at Canterbury. He insisted on leaving at sixteen; spent a year at Heidelberg University; and on his return decided to study medicine, although he lacked a doctor’s vocation. His stutter had precluded him from becoming a lawyer. Maugham duly graduated from St Thomas’s teaching hospital. He was sufficiently brilliant to be offered a place on the staff of the hospital. However he did not take it up. His first novel, a gritty piece of social realism, Liza of Lambeth, written in 1897, had been a great success. Maugham decided to make writing his profession. His next novel was panned by the critics. He moved back to Paris, where life was cheaper than in London, and where he could survive on a small inherited income.
While in Paris, Maugham made the acquaintance of the rising generation of writers, artists and art critics, like Clive Bell, and of picturesque bohemians, like Aleister Crowley the magician. By now an atheist, Maugham is said to have sold his soul to the devil in Paris at Crowley’s urging. Whatever the reason, his luck changed. On a critic’s advice he gave up writing novels and switched to plays: clever, daring social comedies, and to short stories. (He soon returned to novel-writing, however.) At one point only Bernard Shaw had more plays in the West End. He became, and remained, affluent.
By 1914 Maugham was famous, with ten plays produced and ten novels published – not all of them distinguished – as well as short stories and literary criticism. Already too old to enlist when World War I broke out, Maugham served in France as an ambulance driver with the British Red Cross in a group of some 23 well-known British and American writers. During this time he met Gerald Haxton, a young American who became his companion and lover until Haxton’s death in 1944. He did not remain an ambulance driver for long: he was soon recruited by MI6and moved to Geneva, where, posing as an exiled writer (which he was), he functioned as a very effective spy and spy-master. He seems to have been a natural agent-handler. His cover was never broken and he was never killed, although he came close to the latter more than once. Although less dashing, his job was as dangerous as that of any soldier, and far more lonely.
Although gay, Maugham was capable of responding to women. When a glamorous one, Mrs Syrie Wellcome, daughter of Dr Thomas Barnardo and wife of Henry Wellcome, the pharmaceuticals millionaire, set her cap at him, he embarked on an affair with her. This led to a scandalous society divorce and the birth of his daughter Liza, later Lady Glendevon. However the marriage was not a success; it too ended in divorce. Given Haxton’s presence in Maugham’s life, this was foreseeable.
In 1926 Maugham bought the Villa Mauresque on the French Riviera, which was his home for most of the rest of his life. His output continued to be impressive, including plays, short stories, novels, essays and travel books. By 1940, when the collapse of France forced Maugham to leave, he was one of the most famous and wealthiest writers in the English-speaking world. Maugham spent most of World War II in the USA, where his publisher, Nelson Doubleday, put a house at his disposal. He continued to write and to work clandestinely for MI6m in the USA. After the war he returned to live at the Villa Mauresque, which had escaped major damage. He died in 1965.
Two questions remain:
How important was his gayness to Maugham’s writing? In real life it had caused him a lot of stress and pain. In his fiction and his criticism he hardly ever refers to it. It may however come across indirectly in his realistic treatment of women characters, for whom he felt no romantic or chivalrous awe, although he liked intelligent, well-educated women. Put simply, Maugham’s female characters have sexual needs which they acknowledge and seek to satisfy, which was rare in English fiction at that time. In fact, his fiction is realistic, economical and devoid of false sentimentality in a way that is more like French, than English, writing of that era. This may be a matter of gayness; it may also reflect the fact that Maugham, who was bilingual, probably preferred French authors to English ones. He had a particular admiration for such terse writers as Maupassant and Flaubert, whose stories have “a beginning, a middle and an end” and very few literary frills. He also disliked setting out moral lessons in his works. Villains often go unpunished, as they do in real life. He was unshockable and tolerant of the vices of others, knowing what his own were. This caused him to be criticised.
How important a writer was Maugham? The jury is still out. Maugham was modest: he described himself as “in the very first row of the second-raters”. Yet he enjoyed great commercial success with high book sales, successful theatre productions and a string of film adaptations. These, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a comfortable life. Part of the problem is that his plays, clever and witty though they are, are dated and now only produced as period pieces. Much of his work consists of short stories, which are regarded in the UK and USA as an “easy and amateur” literary genre, which they most certainly are not. Just try it sometime. In France, where short stories are taken seriously, Maugham’s status is higher than it is in the UK. Yet his great novel, Of Human Bondage, is still considered a masterpiece. Another, Cakes and Ale, is a delightful, witty and satirical comic novel. His short stories are masterpieces, especially those dealing with the lives of Westerners (colonists, missionaries, planters, tourists) in the Far East and Polynesia. The Ashenden spy stories influenced a whole generation of thriller writers, including Ian Fleming.
I still think that Maugham is a master.
The Indigo Bird
An Erotic Novel by Max Markham
James Graveney, a young Major in a respectable regiment, is outwardly conventional. In private James is bisexual, with a strong urge for his own sex. Gay sex, however, is illegal in the Army, so he is discreet about this.
James’ world is turned upside-down when he meets Lieutenant Richard Finch. Richard is intelligent, charismatic and exceptionally handsome. He doesn’t mess around. He gets what he wants, and is completely unscrupulous about how he gets it. Richard will stop at nothing to achieve this, including Machiavellian deception and a cunning and brutal murder. James starts responding to Richard, cautiously at first, then gets swept along on the great love affair of his life.
The Indigo Bird is a rollercoaster of surprises set against backdrops varying from the jungles of Belize to London, the English countryside, and Ireland, and the scene is set for more shocks and adventures. [Read more...]
The Indigo Bird is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords.com, Amazon Kindle US, Amazon Kindle UK, and any other good bookstore.
