In his lifetime, Somerset Maugham was the most successful writer in the Anglophone world. By the time he was 90, 80 million copies of his books had been sold, he was a media celebrity and a very rich man. He had also lived, as Selina Hastings says, 'much of his life under cover'. He went to great lengths to erase evidence of his private life, systematically destroying his personal papers, asking friends to burn his letters, and instructing his executors to discourage would-be biographers. In company, he was notorious - at least in late middle and old age - for being aloof and misanthropic: 'An unpleasant man,' P.G. Wodehouse told an interviewer in the 1970s. Kenneth Clark, with whom Hastings says Maugham enjoyed a 'firm friendship', described him as 'an extremely mysterious character'; Christopher Isherwood likened him to a Gladstone bag: 'God only knows what is inside.' (Maugham said much the same about Isherwood.)

LRB 17 December 2009 | PDF Download