1934 photo by Carl Van Vechten, Library of Congress public domain. Born: January 25, 1874, in the British Embassy in Paris

Died: December 16, 1965, in Nice, France.

Married: Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo Wellcome

Children: Mary Elizabeth

William Somerset Maugham was one of the most popular writers of his time, and reputedly the highest paid author of the 1930s.

Maugham's mother Edith Mary Snell had tuberculosis, and died of the disease when he was eight; his father died two years later, of cancer. Raised by an uncle, the remainder of his childhood was unhappy. He studied medicine, which proved a useful background for his career as an author as it put him into close contact with people of a social class he would otherwise have been unlikely to encounter. Although he qualified as a doctor, he had a critical and popular success with his first book, and promptly gave up his medical career; by the time he was forty, he had published ten novels and ten of his plays had been produced.

During World War I, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in France; it was during this time that he finished Of Human Bondage. He also became involved in British intelligence work at this time, and he was able to use his career as a writer as a cover for travel that was useful for gathering information, and later provided material for his fiction. A collection of short stories that he wrote about a British spy influenced Ian Fleming in writing the James Bond novels. Maugham was diagnosed with TB after his service as an ambulance driver, and spent two years curing in Scotland.

Maugham stayed in Saranac Lake for a period of time in 1944, accompanying his romantic partner and personal secretary of thirty years, Gerald Haxton; Haxton cured briefly at the Alta Vista Lodge. Although his health improved for a few weeks in Saranac Lake, he died shortly thereafter.

While staying in Saranac Lake, Maugham judged a local short story contest, the Blanchet Memorial Contest. But he did not enjoy his time here, disliking his hotel [the Hotel Saranac] and the food intensely. According to Joan Siedenburg, he became friends with Albert Charles Bagdasarian during his stay in Saranac Lake and they played cards together at the Hotel Saranac.

The Adirondack Research Room of the Saranac Lake Free Library has on file a transcript of Maugham's Radio Address on WNBZ, July 30, 1944.

The Guild News: Guild House Broadcast, By W. Somerset Maugham-July 1945

Ladies and Gentlemen, 

I've come here to speak to you for 15 minutes. It's not a very long time, but when I step before a microphone I am always haunted by a story I heard long ago. A young priest was preaching his first sermon before his bishop and after the service he made bold to ask the bishop what he thought of it. 

"It was short" said the bishop. "I tried not to be boring," said the young priest. "But you WERE boring," said the bishop.

Anyhow,  now I think I should start by telling you that I have come only to talk to those of you who are here to gain your health. I suppose that anyone else who is listening to me should give a little twiddle to one of the knobs on his radio. I'm afraid its too late for him to get a sermon, but he might get a bit of music or a bit of news. 

I have never been in the Adirondacks before and I think all of us who come here either to get well or to see friends and relatives who are sick are lucky to find ourselves in such a beautiful part of the country. But since we're by ourselves so to speak there is one thing about the inhabitants of Saranac Lake that has puzzled me. They seem entirely to have lost the use of the word "yes." Of course I know "Yep," "Ya," and the word that is spelled "yeah" which I have never been able to pronounce. But I have noticed that here the word commonly used for the affirmation is "H'm, H'm." If I ask the waitress in my hotel for a roll or a cup of coffee, they answer "H'm," and if I go into a market and ask the young woman at the counter if they have any raspberries today, which I hurriedly change to "raz berries," when I see the bewilderment on her face, she replies "H'm." Now that's all right. I understand. I daresay it's O.K. when her boy friend asks her to the movies and she says "H'm," but when, after holding hands with her all evening, he asks her to marry him, does she say "H'm"? It sounds a little indifferent to me, but it may of course be that she puts more expression into it than when I ask her for a cup of coffee. I wouldn't know.

But I haven't come to talk to you about the intricacies of the English language. I want to talk to you about the illness that has brought you here. I am talking about something I know because I suffered from T.B. myself. I contracted it during the last war and when the symptoms showed themselves I happened to be in New York. I had just been asked to go on a mission to Russia and I went to see a specialist and asked him what he thought about me going. He examined me and said "Well, if there wasn't a war on I'd advise you to go to a sanatorium, but as there is, and your mission seems important, I don't see why you shouldn't risk it."

So I went. Well, Russia was all right, only there was no bread, no butter, no milk, no sugar, only meat and vegetables. Fortunately for me, the Bolshevik revolution broke out and I was hustled home on a destroyer. I was quite sick and was sent to a sanatorium in the north of Scotland. I spent the better part of two years there. 

Now what I want to tell you is what benefit I got out of it, not only to my health, for I got quite well, but in other ways as well.

First of all, I discovered what a very pleasant thing it is to lie in bed. If you're an active person and have led an active life it's a great rest and very comfortable to lie in bed with an easy conscience while the days pass, the weeks pass, and time ceases to matter. 

Of course I was lucky in being a writer. For as you know a writer only needs a pen and a pad of paper and he is independent of everybody for company or entertainment . It was while I was being cured that I wrote a book that some of you may have heard of or seen in the movies. It was called "The Moon and Sixpence." (To Be Continued)

 

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