«I JUST READ EVERYTHING»

Somerset Maugham was well-placed to come up with his wonderful description of the French Riviera  -  'a sunny place for shady people'. The most louche of all the expatriates who congregated on the beautiful stretch of coast between Nice and Monaco before World War II, the prolific writer held court at his fabulous mansion, the Villa Mauresque, in glamorous Cap Ferrat. Nude bathing parties, drugs, lashings of champagne and nightly seductions of the local lads Almost everyone who visited was shocked by his decadence.  The predatory Maugham had so many affairs, with both sexes, that even the most promiscuous of his companions described him as the most sexually voracious man they had ever known, and couldn't understand why, at a time when homosexuality was illegal, he hadn't landed in prison. But no one refused an invitation, because he was so famous. T.S. Eliot, H.G Wells, Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill all made their pilgrimage south and most ended up aghast.To Virginia Woolf, the ageing Maugham, with his reptilian skin, seemed dead already. Noel Coward called him the 'lizard of Oz'.Today, with Maugham having fallen out of fashion, one has to remind oneself that he once outsold all his brilliant contemporaries, including Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson. Before the age of 30, he had four plays on in the West End at the same time.And by the time he had written Of Human Bondage in 1915, describing a young man's perverse enslavement to the wayward woman he loved, Maugham was hailed a genius  -  his aphorisms on a par with those of the master, Oscar Wilde.

Daily Mail
August 29 2009