The critic I am waiting for is the one who will explain why, with all my faults, I have been read for so many years by so many people. —W. Somerset Maugham

“Four powers govern men: avarice, lust, fear, and snobbishness.” Somerset Maugham didn’t write that; Hilaire Belloc did. But Somerset Maugham, I think it fair to say, believed it. Avarice, lust, fear, and snobbishness are Maugham’s great subjects; they are everywhere in his work, as theme, as motive, as background. Small wonder that they would be, for the same dark quartet—avarice, lust, fear, and snobbishness—were also the four reigning qualities in Somerset Maugham’s own triumphant, lengthy, and finally rather sad life.

Cyril Connolly once called Somerset Maugham the “last of the great professional writers.” He meant it as an honorific. It has not always been taken that way. One small step down from the professional writer is the hack; one large step up is the artist. A great many more critics have been willing to drop Maugham a step than have been willing to raise him a step. Maugham was always highly conscious of this; and one could string together a quite long necklace composed of the BB’s he shot over his lifetime at highbrow critics, small-public writers, intellectual-magazine editors, and others who accorded his work less respect than he thought it deserved. “But you must remember the intelligentsia despise me,” Maugham in late life told his nephew Robin Maugham. “Take that magazine that’s