Description:

Maugham William 1874 - 1965 Beautiful example of a W. Somerset Maugham TLS

Single page TLS, 5.25" x 8.25" on Villa Mauresque / St. Jean .Cap Ferrat / A.M. Letterhead. Dated "9th December 1964", and boldly signed by William Somerset Maugham with his initials as "W.S.M". Single center fold, else near fine. Accompanied by the original post marked mailing envelope with a delightful French stamp, addressed to Lavergne E. Williams, 5.5" x 4.5" with handwritten notes of "Etats Unis". Envelope is neatly slight across top, else near fine.


A warm holiday thank you note, acknowledging receipt of her "charming card", and wishing her best wishes for "Christmas and the New Year". This lovely card, written from Maugham's French Villa, is dated just one year before his death.

Maughams complicated life began with the loss of both parents by age 10, then being raised by a cold and emotionally cruel uncle, he developed a substantial amount of inferiority and anxiety, thus creating (and combating) a stammer that developed and haunted him throughout his life. However, with all the ills of his personal life, his business life went well. By 1907 his life pulled together and his achieved success as a playwright with four plays running simultaneously in London. Commercial success with high book sales, successful theatre productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers.

With all he achieved with his business success, his personal life was never smooth. He once confessed: "I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed .... He grappled with his homosexuality during an era when being openly gay was impossible. Whether his own orientation disgusted him (as it did many at a time when homosexuality was widely considered a moral failing as well as illegal) or whether he was trying to disguise his leanings, Maugham wrote disparagingly of the gay artist. He had once said "It cannot be denied that the homosexual has a narrower outlook on the world than the normal man. In certain respects the natural responses of the species are denied to him. Some at least of the broad and typical human emotions he can never experience. However subtly he sees life he cannot see it whole...I cannot now help asking myself whether what I see in El Greco's work of tortured fantasy and sinister strangeness is not due to such a sexual abnormality as this."

But Maugham's homosexuality or bisexuality is believed to have shaped his fiction in two ways. Since he tended to see attractive women as sexual rivals, he often gave his women characters sexual needs and appetites, in a way quite unusual for authors of his time, all featured women determined to feed their strong sexual appetites, heedless of the result. As Maugham's sexual appetites were then officially disapproved of, or criminal, in nearly all of the countries in which he travelled, the author was unusually tolerant of the vices of others. Some readers and critics complained that Maugham did not condemn what was bad in the villains of his fiction and plays. Maugham replied: "It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me."

The final years of his life were complicated for Maugham and held high personal drama. In 1962, just a few years before his death, he sold a collection of paintings, some of which had already been assigned to his daughter Liza by deed. She sued her father and won a judgment of ë£230,000. Maugham publicly disowned her and claimed she was not his biological daughter. He adopted Searle as his son and heir but the adoption was annulled. In his 1962 volume of memoirs, Looking Back, he attacked the late Syrie Maugham and wrote that Liza had been born before they married. The memoir cost him several friends and exposed him to much public ridicule. Liza and her husband Lord Glendevon contested the change in Maugham's will in the French courts, and it was overturned. But, in 1965 Searle inherited ë£50,000, the contents of his French Villa, Maugham's manuscripts and his revenue from copyrights for 30 years. Thereafter the copyrights passed to the Royal Literary Fund.

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