Somerset Maugham was a British secret agent, a London physician, and the highest paid author in the world in the thirties, writing countless stories and creating plays so successful that he opened four different shows on the London stage at the same time. Ian Fleming’s spy novels were inspired by Maugham’s sophisticated secret agent stories (Maugham’s spy stories, based upon his own experiences working for British intelligence while posing as an author/playwright visiting foreign locales, also inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s 1937 film “Secret Agent”). Maugham was the modern author who most influenced George Orwell, and he was universally praised by other authors from Graham Greene to John le Carre (“Maugham…is a genius.” Theodore Dreiser).
Among Maugham’s novels, short stories and stage comedies, his travel stories have become the most enduring, as they manage to capture remote locations and times that Maugham personally experienced, and depicted characters and cultures now vanished.
Like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Maugham volunteered with an army ambulance corps during the Great War; he thereafter was recruited by British intelligence to serve as a secret agent.
During his British Intelligence years, and in constant search for interesting literary material, Maugham travelled to revolutionary Russia (ordered by the head of the British secret service—known only as “R”—to “stop the Bolshevik revolution;” Maugham reported that he had arrived too late to do so, but observed that, if he’d had gotten there a few months earlier he believed he might have been able to do so!)
Following the War, Maugham traveled extensively through British India, Malaysia, and sailed throughout the South Seas. Maugham owned a villa in the South of France where he composed his stories. His villa was seized by the Nazis during the Second World War and Maugham thereupon escaped Europe for Los Angeles, where he enjoyed yet another profitable career as a Hollywood screenwriter.
This SDG will take a tour of Maugham’s travel writing and examine the life and times of Maugham’s autobiographical characters, from pre-1914 Europe and the embryonic USSR to British India, Pago Pago, France, Spain and diverse foreign locales, featuring Maugham’s assortment of memorable characters, including the author’s suave prototype for James Bond.
