SOMERSET MAUGHAM AND THE MAUGHAM DYNASTY By Bryan Connon Sinclair-Stevenson, $340 When, during the campaign for decriminalisation of homosexual acts in Britain, a host at a dinner party challenged the eminent novelist and playwright W Somerset Maugham to join the fight, he reportedly clenched his fists, grew white with anger, then got up and left.
Heterosexuals are thin on the ground in this garrulous, gossipy book, and Maugham is not one of them. Yet during all his long life he struggled to present himself as an inveterate womaniser.
Since his death the truth about Maugham's sexual orientation has slowly come out, cautiously at first in 1965 in his nephew Robin's Somerset And All The Maughams, then more fully in Ted Morgan's biography in 1980, and now in this chatty collection of reminiscences. Almost all anonymous, the anecdotes that make up most of this book were apparently culled from gay people still alive who knew him or had heard stories about him.
The stories are mostly salacious. One tells of Maugham allegedly watching from an armchair at London parties while a 'demonstration of sexual prowess' by guardsmen 'often with the ready assistance of volunteers from the audience' formed the entertainment.
Another has him miming to his favourite song Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend at dinners in his villa in the south of France where he received celebrities of the day, frequently fellow gays. Noel Coward dubbed the house, with its all-male and autocratic ambience, 'the other Vatican'.
But Maugham's fiction almost invariably describes a world of middle-class values, a system he was indeed sardonic about, and yet one he appeared - through his mockery of its hapless victims - somehow to endorse.