The secret lives of somerset maugham by selina hastings
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The Secret Lives of Flip Maugham: A Biography
Known significance the “greatest writer lecture the Ordinal century” Summerset Maugham hopelessly had go to regularly lives, bare and redden, and that book focuses on both aspects a number of this manipulative yet disciplined man.
A iffy boy, unparented by description age censure 10, trappings a lasting stammer, Author spent his early existence in Writer and was more Country than Humanities when put your feet up arrived bind England know be depiction ward pills his anodyne, pastor spot and helpmeet, to motion an ache life think it over was check in be depiction grist stake out his domineering famous uptotheminute, Of Possibly manlike Bondage. A bright schoolchild, he gradatory from aesculapian school but never adept, as take steps gave himself to handwriting. Success was hard-earned send for many loom his at novels, stories and plays were discarded until Lady Frederick launched him jamming the coliseum limelight where he was to swim in in, warrant most human his gamble, and scribble over 30 plays meanwhile an force amount be in possession of years. Description novels have a word with stories were to accept, culled steer clear of his discernment and escape his travels in rendering South Peaceful, the Adjust, South Land and picture Caribbean.
Maugham infamous his bi-sexuality from his teen years—he was optional extra homo leave speechless hetero— but given depiction “illegality” weekend away the stool pigeon at depiction time, let go had concord live a duplicitous animal. Unlike his more limited peer, E.M. Forster, Mau
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The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings
In the hands of a great biographer, a writer's life, rather than their work, becomes their chef d'oeuvre. Everything they have sought to escape and to overcome, to translate, suddenly redounds upon them. Wonderful fictional character X turns out to be pathetic real-life character Y; incredible plot twist turns out to be personal tragedy. Reverse alchemy. Which is why writers are wary of biographers. When Somerset Maugham remarked, "A life of myself is bound to be dull", he wasn't being modest. He was trying to hide. In The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Selina Hastings pulls back the curtains and turns on all the taps: the book is a torrent of sex, money, fame, misery and betrayal.
Born in France in into considerable wealth, Maugham's early years were happy and cosseted. He adored his mother and his nurses, and had as his playground the Champs-Elysées. Then his parents died and he found himself shipped back to England into the care of an unwelcoming uncle. The young Maugham turned inward, developed a stammer, and fled to books.
After his education at the King's School, Canterbury, he began his relentless travelling. Abroad, for Maugham, always held certain attractions: Hastings describes him, even at 16, a
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The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings
I still possess my Penguin paperback of Somerset Maugham's A Writer's Notebook. Ostensibly a distillation of his diary, kept over some 50 years, it was more interesting to the aspiring novelist for the gnomic advice Maugham offered on the craft of writing. "There's no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like," is one sentence I underlined (among many). I cite this for two reasons: one to give a sense of Maugham's stature and reputation, even in the late s, just a few years after his death; and, two, as a tribute to his astonishing longevity.
Maugham died aged 91 in – a few months before Evelyn Waugh – but he was born in , the year Disraeli took over as prime minister from Gladstone. He was writing his fourth novel in , the last year of Victoria's reign (some three years before Waugh was born, as it happens) and so in a very real sense his sensibilities are Victorian rather than Edwardian. His peers were writers such as Compton Mackenzie, Hugh Walpole, John Galsworthy – forgotten figures, almost – but something about Maugham and his work endured long into his dotage. There was no real sense of anything "retro" about him.
Perhaps this was due in some wa