Willie's Last Chapters

SOMERSET AND ALL THE MAUGHAMS by Robin Maugham. 270 pages. New American Library. $5.95.

"I've been a horrible and evil man," said Somerset Maugham, past 91 and dying at a pace he found painfully slow. "Every one of the few people who have ever got to know me well has ended up by hating me." Then, as if to prove it, he would sit muttering angrily to himself, or fly into sudden rages at his guests. From the wrinkled nonagenarian mouth came the vilest obscenities, and he agonized over the mistakes in his life. "My greatest one was this. I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer--whereas really it was the other way round."

This cruelly candid self-assessment appears in the remembrance of his nephew Robin, who is himself a novelist (The Servant, The Slaves of Timbuktu). And although the effect is morbid, it is by far the best part of the book, which is otherwise devoted to a soporific account of the family genealogy. Death watches can be questioned on grounds of taste, but it is certainly true that Willie Maugham did not die well.

The last chapters of Maugham's own story gave the world a view that it had tended to forget or ignore. His admitted homosexuality got a fresh airing during his celebrated 1963 court fight. He had married Syrie Wellcome and fathered a child, and then was divorced in 1927. Maugham wanted to leave the bulk of his possessions to his secretary and male companion of 36 years. His daughter, Lady Glendevon, took Maugham to court, and after a lot of nasty publicity, he lost the case. Vowing, after The Summing Up, never again to sift through an old man's memories, Maugham changed his mind and published some bickering memoirs that included further recriminations against his daughter--leaving his readers to conclude that here indeed was a homosexual who should never have got married for whatever reasons of propriety.

It may be a disservice to one of the world's best storytellers to revive those last ungraceful chapters of his life, but it helps to give his readers perspective. Maugham himself, granted the chance, would surely have rewritten them. "Dying is a very dull, dreary affair," he once said. "And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it."

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