Max Markham is the author of Indigo Bird – An Erotic Novel and The Vertical Land. For more information on the author and his work, please visit Max Markham’s Section on this website.
Robin Maugham was the nephew of William Somerset Maugham and the son of Lord Chancellor Frederic Maugham, First Viscount Maugham, and his wife Helen Romer Maugham. Helen Maugham’s father, Sir Charles Romer, was a distinguished senior judge. On his father’s side Robin Maugham also descended from a distinguished legal dynasty. He was overshadowed by his more famous uncle and father but was nevertheless a successful novelist, biographer, playwright, travel writer and anti-slavery campaigner. Some of his plays and novels, like The Servant, starring Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles, Wendy Craig and James Fox, were successfully filmed. Like his uncle Willie, Robin Maugham was gay. When he died in 1981, the Maugham name, and his viscountcy, became extinct. He was an openly gay author.
Robert Cecil Romer Maugham - Copyright by National Portrait Gallery, London
Born in 1916, Robin (Robert Cecil Romer) Maugham was educated at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Against his better judgement, but in response to family pressure, Maugham underwent pupillage as a trainee Barrister. He never, however, practiced Law. The Second World War, in which he was to serve bravely, delivered him from this fate.
Robin Maugham joined the Inns of Court Officers’ Training Corps in 1939 and was commissioned into the County of London Yeomanry in 1940. Wounded in the head in tank warfare in the Western Desert, he was Mentioned in Despatches by his Commanding Officer. He bore shrapnel in his head until his death. Maugham was never quite the same after his head-wound, which seemed to have mind-altering effects that lasted, on and off, for the rest of his life. These may have been aggravated by alcohol consumption and by drugs; both medically-prescribed and others. In particular, as he related in his autobiography, Escape from the Shadows, Robin Maugham experienced a literally split personality. Under certain stimuli, his “other personality”, nicknamed “Tommy” would take over. Unlike Robin, “Tommy” was decisive, confident, aggressive, a good soldier, and very heterosexual. Both “Tommy” and Robin drank more alcohol than was good for them. Occasionally “Tommy” would appear to Maugham in visions or dreams. Maugham rarely had any recollection of “Tommy’s” escapades: other people would update him later.
Maugham’s first book Come to Dust was described as a ‘classic’ by Graham Greene and among his other best known books were The Wrong People, The Second Window, Line on Ginger, Somerset and all the Maughams, Conversations with Willie, and his bestselling autobiography Escape From The Shadows. As a writer of fiction, his talent lay in dialogue, terse narratives and the reappearing themes of control and corruption. “I write of control and the hold people have over each other” he said “because that is how I see it. It is a predominant factor in everyone.” Occasionally, comparisons in the Press between Robin Maugham’s works and those of his uncle would put their friendship under strain. So did the behaviour of Somerset Maugham’s boyfriend and Secretary, Gerald Haxton (died 1944), who had attempted to seduce the young Robin and later acted as pander, supplying him with attractive French youths.
Nearly all of Robin Maugham’s books were optioned for films. Line on Ginger was filmed as The Intruder (1953) and starred Jack Hawkins, Michael Medwin and Dennis Price. The Black Tent (1956, co-written with Bryan Forbes) starred Anthony Steel and Donald Sinden. The Rough and the Smooth (1959), directed by Robert Siodmak, starred William Bendix and Tony Britton.
Robin Maugham was more open about his homosexuality than his uncle William Somerset Maugham. His gay career began at Eton; it continued at Cambridge and in the army. He often alluded to it in his works; both fictional and autobiographical. At different times he openly lived with three different young men, whom he conflates into one, called Jim, in Escape from the Shadows. However he was in reality bisexual. His alter ego, “Tommy” was heterosexual, which means that Maugham was too, when “Tommy” took over, which he did fairly often. Before the Second World War, Robin Maugham had been briefly and informally engaged to Gillian Dearmer. Gillian was the daughter of Percy Dearmer, a prominent Anglican priest and liturgist. He also appears to have been engaged to Mary Churchill, the daughter of Sir Winston Churchill, whom he hero-worshipped.
Although his relations with his uncle Willie were never easy – no-one’s relations with Somerset Maugham ever were – a genuine bond grew up between uncle and nephew. This was not the case between Robin Maugham and his father, Lord Chancellor Maugham. After Robin Maugham was invalided out of the army following his head-wound, he convalesced with his uncle at Parker’s Ferry, the house which his American publisher, Nelson Doubleday, had placed at Somerset Maugham’s disposal. Somerset Maugham taught Robin the important truth, that “you cannot alter your essential nature.” At that time Robin Maugham still hoped for a “cure” for his homosexuality. Uncle Willie’s illustration was illuminating:
One day he had been resting at his hotel in New York when Reception rang and told him that Mr Maugham had called and wished to see him.
“There must be some mistake,” said Somerset Maugham. “I’m Mr Maugham.” Nevertheless Reception insisted that there was a Mr Maugham who wished to see him. Out of curiosity Somerset Maugham invited him up.
Through the door walked one of the American Maughams. Unknown to Somerset Maugham, a collateral ancestor had emigrated and founded an American branch of the Maugham family, which is now extinct. They pronounced their name “Moffam”, rather than “Mawm”. This man was one of his distant cousins. What struck Somerset Maugham most was the younger Mr Maugham’s resemblance to himself, although they were not close relations. He was slim, dark and had showed pluck in coming to visit his famous, and famously irritable, English cousin. What shook Somerset Maugham especially was that his visitor not only resembled him facially: he was obviously sensitive, bohemian and artistic as well. Somerset Maugham does not tell us whether his kinsman also seemed to be gay, although this may be implicit in the story. Words like “sensitive” and “bohemian” often had gay connotations at that period. Finally, he suffered from the same appalling stammer as Somerset Maugham himself, which had made his life a misery in his youth.
“We are the products of our genes and hormones” said Somerset Maugham. “You cannot change your essential nature.”
In the last year of his life, his creative powers finally begun to subside: Robin Maugham was all but financially, and creatively, bankrupt. His wealthy uncle had left him nothing in his Will. Robin Maugham was aware that he fitted into no school or category of authors and that, no matter how shocking his work, he could not be part of the new avant-garde movement of social realism. Before going into a Brighton hospital for a check up, he confided to his partner, William Lawrence, that he had come to realize that his work was no longer fashionable and that he would probably come to be seen as an obscure writer from the forgotten 1950s. This is not quite true: Escape from the Shadows is still considered a classic of autobiography, while a number of Maugham’s novels are still in print. Several of the films of his novels are regarded as classics. Maugham’s autobiographical and biographical writing is considered the primary source for information about his famous ancestors, who included not merely Lord Chancellor Maugham, Somerset Maugham and Robert Maugham, the founder of the Law Society, but a number of other interesting lawyers, writers and clergymen. But he is hard to categorise: what sort of author was he? His work includes thrillers, war novels, gay novels, plays, short stories and some brilliant travel writing. His style is his own; he belongs to no school of literature.
Although he died in hospital, the circumstances of Robin Maugham’s death remain mysterious; incompatible stories purport to relate how he met his end. According to one, Maugham himself took the decision to authorise a doctor to turn off his life-support machine. Another version suggests that, within a few weeks of routine treatment, he had died unexpectedly from an embolism. Whatever the truth, the hospital managed to mislay his body. For over two days he was missing, which made an autopsy and final diagnosis impossible. Robin Maugham remained, in death as in life, a bit of a mystery. The circumstances of his death were curiously like a plot for one of his novels, with a twist in the tail: he might well have appreciated that. What is clear is that his health had been seriously impaired by his alcoholism and diabetes, which were related. The shrapnel lodged in his brain from World War II may have moved and killed him. It was certainly a factor, as was his disappointment at how his life had turned out.
Officially a Christian and definitely an admirer of Jesus, Robin Maugham was privately more like an agnostic with a spiritual side. His feelings for religion seemed to exist mainly in the power of hymns, music and words to move us. He had read many of the major philosophers, including the cynical conclusions of Schopenhauer’s denial of sexual instinct, favoured by his atheist uncle, Somerset Maugham; Aristotle and Machiavelli. Robin Maugham favoured the ideas of Jeremy Bentham’s social reforms, Hume’s reflections on the power of the imagination, and Ivan Pavlov’s conclusions on conditioned reflexes. Latterly, he would dwell on mystical concepts that moved the spirit like Buddhism, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Upanishads, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
I met Robin Maugham once, in a doctor’s waiting room. We attended the same GP practice in London, and we got talking. For the record, he was far kinder and pleasanter than his famous uncle, about whom he told an interesting story. This suggested that the legend that Somerset Maugham had, as a young man, sold his soul to the Devil in Paris might have had some factual foundation. Our doctor once let slip that Robin Maugham was “a really screwed-up homosexual” This was hardly an indiscretion; it comes out clearly in Maugham’s autobiographical works. He would not have dissented.
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The Vertical Land – Book Two of the Richard Finch Series
A Gay Erotic Thriller by Max Markham
1982, London: James Graveney (now a Lieutenant-Colonel) and Richard Finch (now promoted to Captain), the heroes of Book One of the Richard Finch Series, The Indigo Bird, have both had a “good war” in the Falklands, serving respectively with the Fusiliers and the Special Air Service (SAS). So has James’s dynamic wife, Tori, a researcher, who was also caught up in the war. Now they all have to come back to earth with a bump. James is a Lieutenant-Colonel without a command; Richard’s attachment to the SAS has come to an end.
Fate comes to their rescue. James is unexpectedly posted to Nairobi as Military Attaché to the amiable British High Commissioner, Sir Tom Sheridan. A bloody coup in August 1982 ensures that no-one but Richard wants the job of James’s Assistant Military Attaché. James may be married and outwardly respectable; Richard may be professionally ambitious, but it is not long before the two friends are caught up in a series of adventures – amorous, erotic and positively dangerous – in Kenya and Sudan.
Once more Max Markham provides a rollercoaster of shocks and surprises against backdrops ranging from sophisticated London to raffish Nairobi, to mercilessly beautiful and dangerous remote, up-country Africa.
The Vertical Land is available at Amazon.Com incl. the US Kindle version, Amazon.co.uk incl. the UK Kindle version, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.
