In the 1950s, when I was 14, I spent a winter fortnight with my parents at the Villa Mauresque, which Somerset Maugham had lent to them to entertain the recently widowed Rab Butler and his daughter, Sarah. It was an uneasy holiday setting for two teenage girls. As I wrote a little apprehensively in my diary, ‘this house is lovely, but rather fragile,’ a concern which was borne out the next day when, during a pillow fight, I knocked over a full jug of orange juice with disastrous results for the immaculate upholstery. Never was a house more thoroughly permeated by the spirit of its absent owner, who looked down on us in melancholy reproach from the famous Graham Sutherland portrait on the wall. The regime ran with clockwork regularity. Every meal was served at a precisely pre-ordained moment and no dish on the menu could be repeated.
Maugham’s last years at the Villa Mauresque are vividly described by Selina Hastings in The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, where she tells how he became haunted by the Sutherland portrait with ‘its merciless vision … of an inexorably approaching and miserable old age.’ This sad final chapter is what many people remember about Somerset Maugham — his descent into senility, during which he did his best to disinherit his daughter and grandchildren, and wrote a deeply wounding personal memoir which caused pain and offence to many of those closest to him. Selina Hastings reminds us that he was a man of far greater stature than this would suggest. I am not sure that she is right in claiming that he was, ‘for much of his life … the most famous writer in the world,’ but he was certainly extremely widely admired and translated, and was familiar to millions who never read his work through the medium of film and television.
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