This 1960s interview with W Somerset Maugham is somewhat a companion piece to my upload ‘E M Forster Talks About Writing Novels - 'Only Connect’’ in that both writers are talking about the connections of literature and life and what they tried to achieve in their novels.
On a personal note, Maugham said of himself in another context:
"I was a quarter normal and three-quarters queer, but I tried to persuade myself it was the other way round. That was my greatest mistake."
Attracted to both sexes as a young man, Maugham proposed marriage to Sue Jones and was refused.
He simultaneously began affaires with Gerald Haxton and Syrie Barnardo Wellcome, who was married at the time to the pharmaceutical magnate.
His daughter, Mary Elizabeth Wellcome, was born in 1915.
From this point on till an acrimonious divorce in the late 1920s, Maugham mostly travelled the world with Haxton, who had been deported from the UK in 1919 as 'an undesirable alien and a security risk' - code for he had too many indescrete gay relationships. Maugham and Haxton settled at Villa Mauresque, on the French Riviera till the younger man's death from alcoholism in 1944 when the writer took up with Alan Searle.
To rush off at another tangent, I’ve loved Maugham’s almost Oscar Wilde-ish Noel Coward-ish humour since I was a child:
[1] At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
[2] Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
[3] It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.
[4] It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
[5] She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
[6] There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
[7] Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
[8] When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
[9] Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
[10] Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
[11] Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.
[12] Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
Enjoy!
