In the 1930s, William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was reportedly the world’s highest paid writer, feted in Hollywood, Europe and able to sell vast quantities of his work in the UK. Born in the British Embassy in Paris, where his father was the embassy lawyer, his mother tragically died of tuberculosis in 1882. By all accounts, her demise had a life long impact on him. The death of his father two years later compounded the tragedy. In 1884 he moved to Whitstable, on the northern coast of Kent to live with his uncle, the vicar there, Henry Maugham.
The rectory in which he lived was demolished in the 1960s to make way for new houses. But his commemoration of this place he had come to in his work was largely unflattering. Whitstable was rechristened the somewhat ominous sounding `Blackstable.’ In the autobiographical `Of Human Bondage’ (1915), the vicar, and his wife and house, are described in largely scathing, gloomy ways. Some of this is simple admitted to be a matter of character. Maugham’s alter-ego, Phillip `had led always the solitary life of an only child and his loneliness at the vicarage was no greater than it had been when his mother had lived.’ But there is also the role of circumstances. The account goes on that `he disliked the fisher folk who were rough, uncouth and went to chapel.’ Blackstable after all was a `low-church parish.’ (`Of Human Bondage,’ Marshall Cavendish 1988 edition, 30-31). The description of the town in the later `Cakes and Ale’ is a little kinder:
`In winter the natives… walked down the empty street with a hurried gait, screwing themselves up in order to expose as little surface as possible to the bitterness of the east wind, but now they dawdled; they stood about in groups in the space between the Duke of Kent and the Bear and Key.’
Philip/Maugham’s progress takes the story to the nearby town of Tercanbury/Canterbury, to the King’s School. `The neighbouring clergy sent their sons there,’ Maugham explains,
`It was united by long tradition to the Cathedral; its headmaster was an honorary Canon and a past headmaster was the Archdeacon. … When they got out of the train at Tercanbury, Philip felt sick with apprehension and during the drive in to the town sat pale and silent. The high brick wall in front of the school gave it the look of a prison. There was a little door in it, which opened on their ringing.’ (38-39)
`Prison’ is pretty much what Maugham’s memory of the King’s School was – a place where his French accent at the time due to his first decade in Paris, and his more cosmopolitan outlook made him fit in poorly. It left him, in fact, with a stammer from which he suffered for the rest of his life. Maugham and Philip both get away from their prison-schools – to Germany. After studying medicine in London, the success of the publication of his first novel, `Liza of Lambeth’ in 1897, meant that from that point on he became an increasingly successful professional author. For the rest of his life, he lived mostly outside the UK – in the French Rivera. The interludes were a period engaging in the First World War in ambulance duties and intelligence work, and passing the Second World War mostly in the USA.
Maugham clearly had not such fond memories of his adolescence in Kent, and had no meaningful contact with the place after his departure. Even so, that one of the most popular writers of his time left such a shallow imprint on the landscape is striking. There is a Blactstable Court off Canterbury Road in the town, and plans to execute a mural to his memory locally – though these have so far been unexecuted. A BBC report in 2014, under the title `Somerset Maugham: Whitstable’s “Forgotten Son”’ posed the question of why such a successful figure had never had a plaque or other form of commemoration for them. Interviewed in the article, Victoria Falconer, director of the Whitstable Literary Festival at the time, had addressed the question of why this was so: `
“He is revered and celebrated internationally but forgotten in Whitstable and I always felt that’s a shame,” Ms Falconer said. “He’s just not considered particularly fashionable in the UK.” Describing Maugham as “a troubled man”, Ms Falconer said: “I think his reputation as a kind of bitter, mean man has prevailed in this country. Perhaps that’s why he’s not really as well known in this country as he is abroad, people remember that side of him.” (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-27309968)
Could Maugham’s works come back into fashion? Rereading `Of Human Bondage’ in order to write this entry, it is hard to see why. The book is entertaining, well written, but when compared to a similar kind of fictionalised autobiography like James’s Joyce’s `A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, issued at almost the same time as Maugham’s work, on almost every level it displays inferiority. There is little sense of communicating the complexity involved in maturation and development as an individual, and no attempt at all to try to convey this with and through the language used in the novel itself. It seems dated and old fashioned – a standard narrative, in a standard idiom. Ironically, Whitstable’s decision to make no public mark of Maugham during his life seems wise, as it would have ended up meaning monuments or inscriptions that would have needed lengthy explanations for people afterwards wondering who this increasingly forgotten figure would possible be. In that sense, his non-commemoration in itself is a sort of commemoration, carrying more meaning than if something were physically testifying to his life there. ity10 \lsdlo