Of Human Bondage / Modern Library 100 Best Novels (ePub)

simultaneously in the West End.

Four years later, Maugham temporarily abandoned playwriting to write the semi-autobiographical Of Human Bondage as a means of exorcising childhood memories that had lately been haunting him. Expanding his Stephen Carey manuscript, Maugham told the story of the clubfooted Philip Carey, an orphan sent to live with his vicar uncle. Philip then studies art in Paris before returning to London to take up medicine, where he meets and falls obsessively in love with the waitress Mildred. Although the novel was not initially a success on its London publication in 1915, it did well in the United States, thanks to a championing review by Theodore Dreiser.

In the winter of 1913, Maugham met Syrie Wellcome, a married woman long separated from her husband. A very public affair ensued; Syrie, pregnant with Maugham's child, suffered a devastating miscarriage. Their liaison was interrupted by Maugham's wartime stint in the Ambulance Unit in France, followed by work as a secret agent. After the war he moved to Rome, where Syrie joined him. In New York in 1916 to witness the production of his play Our Betters, Maugham dodged Syrie by announcing a trip to Tahiti with Gerald Haxton, a high-living American he had met during the war. Haxton, who had earlier been banned from England as an undesirable alien, became Maugham's lover and secretary for twenty-nine years.

The South Seas trip was a journey of discovery for Maugham. Fascinated by the denizens of the Pacific, he gathered much material--including the inspiration for the story 'Miss Thompson,' more famously known onstage and in films as Rain, and for the novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919), based on the life of Paul Gauguin. On the way home to England via America, Maugham wed Syrie in New Jersey. They had a daughter, Liza, and settled uneasily into a marriage blighted by Syrie's increasingly grasping nature and Maugham's fear that she would betray his homosexuality. The couple divorced in 1927, and Syrie went on to enjoy considerable professional success as an interior designer.

In 1928 Maugham bought a home in Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera. During the Second World War he fled to Paris and then to England. At the end of the war, Maugham, now in his seventies, returned to his home in France with a new secretary and companion, his longtime friend Alan Searle. During the twenties and thirties Maugham was a famous and successful playwright and short story writer; many of his stories were made into films. Among his novels are The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930), and The Razors Edge (1944). After a last collection of short stories, Creatures of Circumstances (1947), and a final novel, Catalina (1948), Maugham abandoned fiction entirely for essays and nonfiction. His general nonfiction books, inspired by his love of travel, include On a Chinese Screen (1923) and Don Fernando (1935), the revealing The Summing Up (1938), and A Writer's Notebook (1949). He also established the Somerset Maugham Award, to allow novelists to travel as he himself had done. Maugham died on December 16, 1965, just short of his ninety-second birthday, at his home France. His New York Times obituary said, 'For decades he cast a clinical eye on human behavior and turned out works that made him a fortune few writers have equalled. . . . His style was neat and simple; his stories were sharply defined; . . . his audience was vast.'