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Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham
Robert Calder
Willie (1989) is Robert Calder's authoritative and humane biography of W. Somerset Maugham—the immensely popular novelist, playwright, and short-story master behind Of Human Bondage and The Razor's Edge. “Willie” was Maugham's familiar name, and Calder, a Canadian scholar who spent fourteen years on the project, was the first biographer to work with the cooperation of Alan Searle, Maugham's longtime secretary and companion. The result is notably sympathetic where earlier accounts were cold: Calder relates Maugham's guarded homosexuality, his unhappy marriage to Syrie, and his rootless, self-protective temperament directly to the fiction, illuminating the work through the life. Denied permission to quote Maugham's letters, he paraphrases skillfully without losing texture. Balanced, thorough, and well written, it won Canada's Governor General's Award for nonfiction. For readers of Maugham, or of literary biography generally, it remains one of the best books on a writer too often condescended to.
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The author
Robert Calder was a Canadian writer and professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, and a leading Maugham scholar. Willie, the product of fourteen years of research, won the Governor General's Award for English-language nonfiction in 1989.
The subject
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was among the most successful writers of his age—novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer—whose Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and The Razor's Edge endure. Orphaned young and privately gay in an unforgiving era, he built a public mask that his best fiction quietly interrogates.
The book
Published by St. Martin's Press in 1989, the biography was the first written with the cooperation of Maugham's companion Alan Searle. Refused permission to quote from Maugham's letters, Calder relies on careful paraphrase, and treats Maugham's sexuality with sympathy rather than the distaste of some earlier accounts.
How it reads
Scholarly but graceful. Calder's strength is connecting the guarded man to the candid work, offering a fuller, fairer Maugham than the caricature of the cynical old craftsman.
For more context
Read alongside Maugham's own The Summing Up and Ted Morgan's more astringent 1980 biography.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Robert Calder
- Publisher
- St. Martin's Press
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1989
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Maine