Yogi Berra, the great Yankee Hall of Fame catcher, declared, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Yogi was obviously right, so I can only hope and pray that The Donald’s quashing of DEI lasts, and that other such left-wing malignancies also find their way to the garbage collection. 

And now, with my mind at rest, I have gone back to rereading novels that had impressed and influenced me as a youngster and comparing the reactions I had back then with the ones I get now. It is an interesting exercise, better than watching trash on TV or reading today’s unreadable novels about victimhood and pain written by hysterical women authors.

Papa Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are my two favorite and beloved authors. They formed my thinking and influenced my lifestyle when I was very young. There were others, of course, such as W. Somerset Maugham, the best of all British novelists and the one most disliked by the Brits. Maugham was envied for his wealth, ability to travel in style everywhere in the world, and the fact that everything he wrote sold like hotcakes. I consider him to be the best writer of that rainy little island, and he comes in third on my worldwide list. When I think of Maugham, the only thing I regret is having refused an invite to his palatial French Riviera villa, out of shyness.

Maugham, like Fitzgerald, often wrote about places where I’d been. His fiction also included restaurants with unctuously mannered maîtres d’ hotel, which I so do miss nowadays. Also well-mannered people, now as rare as those unctuously mannered head waiters. He was also a master of the lethal barb, something that, along with his hard-earned wealth, did not endear him to fellow writers.

Maugham had married and was grandfather to two grandchildren by his daughter Liza (one of them, Camilla, Countess Chandon, is still a great beauty and a friend of mine). Despite that, the master writer openly lived with two men who were his secretaries. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967, two years before Maugham’s death, but he didn’t bother to hide. Fellow writers in the closet, like Evelyn Waugh, were obviously jealous because Maugham was highborn and did not have to put on an upper-class accent, hide his sexuality, or live in grubby digs—everything he did was first class. 

Maugham is almost unknown today, something that doesn’t surprise me. Artistic merit nowadays is not matched with success, while fame and mediocrity go hand-in-hand. Back in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, the Bloomsbury Group literary elite predictably denigrated Maugham’s work, while themselves putting out unreadable experimental crap. But novels like Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, Mr. Know-All, The Razor’s Edge, and short stories like “Rain” are superb, psychologically deep, and imaginative, as well as technically superior and precise.

In The Razor’s Edge, my favorite Maugham novel, the hero Larry Darrell, having survived World War I, goes through anti-materialist searches for salvation in French coal mines, in Indian monasteries, even in Parisian dives. But it is Elliott Templeton who steals the show. Maugham makes us forget the saintly Larry for the nouveau riche American Templeton, who is intelligent, ambitious, vain, snobbish, but also extremely kind-hearted. Templeton belonged to the sort of people painted by Sargent on both sides of the Atlantic, observed Selina Hastings in her delightful Maugham biography.

Critics of the time had reservations about Maugham, mostly out of envy and the fact the writer pursued pure artistic desire unmotivated by outside influences. Like all great writers, his passion had chosen him, not the other way round. His books and plays and short stories became bestsellers from day one—yet another reason for envious critics to find fault.

His novels and short stories were redolent with moral questions and touched upon inequality of talent rather than the banality of economic inequality. Elites in any field are more interesting than the common man, and his stories were about places and people out of the beaten path. Maugham adored meeting and writing about murderers in Devil’s Island, the penal colony where he was allowed to roam free and mix because of his fame. Reproducing the atmosphere of our everyday life was not for him, thank God.

And now for the $64,000 question: Why did I refuse the invite to his house? Jerry Zipkin, a flamboyant American homosexual who always claimed Elliott Templeton was based on him (the character was actually based on a just as flamboyantly homosexual American named Chips Channon), ran into me on the Riviera and invited me. I was 20 years old and chickened out, knowing what Zipkin must have said to get me invited. I’ve always regretted it, but it was Maugham himself who had first warned us about the Riviera: “A sunny place for shady people.” ◆