REVEALING MR MAUGHAM
Wednesday, March 21, 2012 at 10:46PM[CULTURE] Alex Hopkins reflects on the Michael House's latest artumentary, Revealing Mr Maugham.
Like many writers, I had a childhood dream. One day I would find myself living in luxurious seclusion, churning out yet another highly anticipated manuscript to a sycophantic publisher who couldn’t do enough for me. My only challenge would be counting those endless royalty cheques as I sipped Martinis under gently swaying palms.
Needless to say reality soon checked in. Last Friday, however, I revisited an era when writers not only made a living from their pen, but were sometimes able to live in the kind of opulence I had dreamt about.
One such individual was the author W. Somerset Maugham, who languished in a sumptuous villa in the South of France. Maugham was one of the most prolific and influential gay writers of our time and now, thanks to an artumentary film by the new global online platform Swim Cinema, the subject of a film entitled Revealing Mr. Maugham.
The 84 minute film sheds new light on the elusive author was commanded a staggering $1 million fee for just one short story. As the most adapted writer of the twentieth century, Maugham courted Hollywood with his ground breaking depictions of sexual jealousy. No wonder gay idols such as Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford were queuing up to play his dramatic female characters.
Through a series of interviews with such current writing luminaries like Armistead Maupin and Alexander McCall Smith, this fascinating documentary shows us the real Maugham – an elusive, yet keen observer of human emotions who used his early experience as a Doctor to create his break through novel Liza of Lambeth.
Success rapidly followed, allowing Maugham to travel widely and devote time to perfecting his craft. This was a writer who entertained his readers with scandalous stories of fallen women and lecherous clergymen. Yet this was also a man who was quick to admit that he lacked imagination and found his subjects simply by reporting events and embellishing them in his writing.
The film serves as more than just an account of a life; it provides an intriguing insight into a writer’s methods. Possibly the most illuminating moments are when a scholar talks about Maugham’s book on writing, The Summing Up, which offers invaluable advice to any wannabe scribe.
The darker, little explored side of Maugham’s life is examined as we are told how he entered into a doomed marriage to interior decorator, Syrie, a woman who he went on to disparage in a series of scandalous newspaper articles in his final years.
His ill-judged behaviour left him a ruined man, shunned by his contemporaries as he tottered around his majestic villa with only his younger, rakish lover Gerald Haxton for company. Haxton, it is revealed, was intent on seizing control of the esteemed writer’s fortune. The sinister tale could serve as a dark warning to older gay men everywhere.
The overriding images of this beautifully made film, however, are of Maugham sitting at his writing desk towards the end of his life. His schedule, we are told, was strict. He wrote until 12pm each day, before taking lunch in his opulent dining room. He would then take a dip in his sun-drenched pool before embarking upon a leisurely stroll around his villa’s immaculately landscaped grounds as he sought fresh inspiration. It’s the kind of decadent, mythical vision of an artist’s life that us struggling writers can still find some solace clinging too, despite the omnipresent realities.
All three showings of Revealing Mr Maugham at this year's BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival is now sold out.
You can watch/download Revealing Mr Maugham and other artumentaries at www.swimcinema.com, with subtitles in different languages.
