Maugham’s Bondage

W. Somerset Maugham was born on 25 January 1874, the son of a lawyer at the British Embassy in Paris. In other perambulators just then, as yet inarticulate, were other dear little fellows, Maurice Baring, Max Beerbohm, G. K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, Ford Madox Ford, Bertrand Russell, crying for much paper and fountain pens. A boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts: but I don’t think it occurred to anybody born between 1872 and 1874 that one might not wish to be a gentleman. Intensity, passion, madness came later. Joyce, Pound, Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Kafka came later with their heightened and disorganized sensibilities acute almost past belief; the generation of 1882-1889; the “modern world,” as they called themselves, the new romantics. Maugham and his immediate contemporaries flourished in the golden, stuffy summer afternoon of English greatness, in the London of Edward VII.

Maugham had the good or bad luck to start out writing while Oscar Wilde still dominated English conversation and writing. “When I was a child, all the world had gone Wilde,” wrote Chesterton. Before little Willie Maugham was ten, Oscar had been satirized in Punch and by Gilbert and Sullivan, feted and flattered all over London and, on a brilliant lecture tour, all across the United States. When Maugham wrote his first book (1893) at the age of nineteen, Oscar was in his prime. I can hardly tell you how utterly he was in it. Wilde destroyed the heavy, velvet, plush sentence in which Victorian people thought and Something Tells Me!

FC

About the Author

Farley Clinton

Featured Tags

Manage following

Literature

Writing

W. Somerset Maugham was born on 25 January 1874, the son of a lawyer at the British Embassy in Paris. In other perambulators just then, as yet inarticulate, were other dear little fellows, Maurice Baring, Max Beerbohm, G. K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, Ford Madox Ford, Bertrand Russell, crying for much paper and fountain pens. A boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts: but I don’t think it occurred to anybody born between 1872 and 1874 that one might not wish to be a gentleman. Intensity, passion, madness came later. Joyce, Pound, Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Kafka came later with their heightened and disorganized sensibilities acute almost past belief; the generation of 1882-1889; the “modern world,” as they called themselves, the new romantics. Maugham and his immediate contemporaries flourished in the golden, stuffy summer afternoon of English greatness, in the London of Edward VII.

Maugham had the good or bad luck to start out writing while Oscar Wilde still dominated English conversation and writing. “When I was a child, all the world had gone Wilde,” wrote Chesterton. Before little Willie Maugham was ten, Oscar had been satirized in Punch and by Gilbert and Sullivan, feted and flattered all over London and, on a brilliant lecture tour, all across the United States. When Maugham wrote his first book (1893) at the age of nineteen, Oscar was in his prime. I can hardly tell you how utterly he was in it. Wilde destroyed the heavy, velvet, plush sentence in which Victorian people thought and Something Tells Me!