How Good Maugham Was: A Critical Reassessment - An International Interdisciplinary Conference

In 2004, after reading Jeffrey Meyers' Somerset Maugham: A Life, reviewer Anthony Daniels asked the question bluntly: “How Good Was Maugham?” (Daniels). His personal answer was that Maugham had made his “the virtue of clarity” at a time when modernism looked down on it. He also contended that Maugham preferred to let his readers deduce the “inner turmoil of his characters” from their behaviour, which led to the charge that he was “a mere observer of externals without much in the way of a soul” (Daniels). Yet Maugham's soul and heart are precisely what makes Maugham an arresting figure for Daniels: he rather regards him as terrified by his own emotions, not detached at all but needing to prevent himself from “break[ing] down altogether,” being constantly torn between the contradictory desires for “freedom and license” on the one hand, and “social respectability and observance of social convention” on the other (Daniels). Although (or because) Maugham's popularity hardly ever waned, and he could still be paid §500 for a two-minute radio talk in 1939 or sell a story to a magazine for §25,000 in 1941 (Hastings 535, 560), he was keenly aware of how condescending or dismissive of the quality of his books critics could prove to be when any new work of his came to their attention. In 1940, an insulting phrase from a review of his previous collection of short stories prompted him to call his next such publication The Mixture as Before. Eight years later, he summarised the usually unfavourable opinion of his reviewers thus in the introduction to Quartet, his first anthology film: “In my twenties the critics said I was brutal; in my thirties they said I was flippant; in my forties they said I was cynical; in my fifties they said I was competent; and then in my sixties they said I was superficial” (Quartet 3'20”-3'31”). Yet, as has now been fully proven, Maugham's allegedly ranking himself “in the very first row of the second-raters” is apocryphal (Blackburn and Arsov 139), and though usually modest about his own gifts, Maugham did occasionally state his good points, as in the following quote from his autobiography, The Summing Up: “I had an acute power of observation, and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed” (qtd. in Hastings 520). This led some critics to claim that Maugham's writing “deserves to be judged entirely on its own merits, as does his legacy as one of the most prolific and popular writers of modern times” (Blackburn and Arsov 148). Well may they say so, seeing that “the English Maupassant” (MacCarthy) achieved literary prowess across genres, his notable works spanning not only novels (Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, The Razor's Edge, etc.) and short story collections (The Trembling of a Leaf, The Casuarina Tree, etc.), but also plays (The Circle, Our Betters, Sheppey, The Constant Wife, etc.), travelogues (The Land of the Blessed Virgin, On a Chinese Screen, The Gentleman in the Parlour), essays (Ten Novels and Their Authors, The Vagrant Mood, Points of View, etc.) and memoirs (The Summing Up, A Writer's Notebook, Looking Back). In Michael House's documentary Revealing Mr. Maugham, novelist and essayist Pico Iyer even goes so far as to praise the power of Maugham's quietly subversive prose over the somewhat arrogant modernist ambitions of literary luminaries like James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf: “I think, in some ways, he was more effectively fearless than any of them because his subject matter was just as way out as theirs were, and yet he placed it in a frame that anybody could read. That ability both to shock you and to put you at ease at the same time is what most of us aspire to, and almost nobody has, but he had instinctively” (House 1'50”-2'07”). In the wake of the 125th anniversary of Maugham's birth (in 1874) and in celebration of the 60th anniversary of his demise (in 1965), the time has thus come to honour one of the most widely read and adapted, revered and dismissed, prolific and versatile British writers of the 20th century, and to reassess not only his extensive body of works but also his contribution to English-language literature, his international aura, his afterlives and legacy. That this conference will take place not only in France, the country Maugham called home for several decades, but also in Le Mans, where his maternal grandmother resided for the last eighteen years of her life, will make it the perfect venue for a long-overdue critical reassessment.