Somerset Maugham was born inside the British embassy to dodge French conscription
France was about to make every boy born on its soil to foreign parents a citizen liable for military service. So the British ambassador set up a maternity ward inside the embassy, legally British ground, and there on 25 January 1874 William Somerset Maugham was born. He qualified as a doctor but never practised.
He came from a family of lawyers. His grandfather helped found the Law Society of England and Wales, his father handled legal work for the British Embassy in Paris, and his brother Frederic rose to be Lord Chancellor. Maugham disliked his middle name, which honoured a great-uncle, and was Willie to everyone who knew him. French was his first language. His mother died of tuberculosis days after his eighth birthday, a loss he called a wound that never fully healed, and his father died two and a half years later.
Sent to an uncle who was vicar of Whitstable in Kent, the boy found small-town England cold after Paris. He grew shy and developed a stammer that never left him. At The King's School, Canterbury, he was mocked for his accent, his size and his indifference to sport, though he later became a generous donor. At sixteen he went to Heidelberg to study literature, philosophy and German, where an older Englishman, John Ellingham Brooks, encouraged his writing. His first book, a biography of Meyerbeer, was rejected and destroyed.
He trained in medicine in London and qualified in 1897, the year his slum novel Liza of Lambeth appeared. Fame came first through the stage: by 1908 four of his plays were running at once in the West End. After his 32nd play in 1933 he turned entirely to fiction. Highbrow critics sneered at his huge sales, but Of Human Bondage, heavily drawn from his own life, is now widely called a masterpiece and his short stories are highly regarded. His clear prose won praise, his fondness for clichés less so.
During the First World War he worked for the British Secret Service and later mined the experience for stories. Mainly homosexual, he married Syrie Wellcome in 1917, but his chief companion was Gerald Haxton, with whom he travelled through Asia and the South Seas collecting material. He died in 1965 aged 91.
Source: W. Somerset Maugham
