Somerset Maugham

A new book about the life of Somerset Maugham has been written by Selina Hastings and a very good book it appears to be having read a few reviews. One passage appealed to me because it showed a rather nice side to Maugham, something I have not been particularly aware of before now. The reviewer writes: "Rejected by the actress Sue Jones, he met Syrie Wellcome who ensnared him by falling pregnant... Syrie threatened to reveal the names of his male lovers if he did not marry her, just as 14 years later she would threaten to reveal them if he did not divorce her. 'By doing the right thing,' said Maugham, 'I brought happiness neither to her nor to myself'."
How is he rated now? I would say that as a playwright he is not rated highly yet he is a damn good one; even now after the period pieces have lost their relevance they work as dramas very effectively. As a novelist he is probably not read much - I found his first novel "Liza of Lambeth" pretty well unreadable, though I liked his "The Painted Veil". He will probably be remembered most as a short story writer, often as good as Maupassant or Chekov. Yet there is that feeling in me that there is something curmugeonly about his attitude to people; there is often an ironic twist in the tail that seems to say: "You may think you are living in a world where morals matter but let me tell you, they don't." It's an attitude more in keeping with the equally curmugeonly Evelyn Waugh than with Chekov, a wholly kindlier soul.
His novels never made good films but his short stories did. There were three films that each had three or four of his stories in them and they were not only critically successful but popular too. I once met a young American who said they were highly rated in the USA and that their filmmakers had tried to emulate them but had failed.
In those films he always introduced the stories himself. What a strange face he had with that downturned mouth and that wrinkled face. A bit like W.H.Auden's face of which Stravinsky is supposed to have said to a friend "One day I would like use a flat iron on his face to see what he really looks like."