British gay/bi male writers and their social circles

As a great admirer of gay literature, the social circles of gay and bisexual male writers is something that piques my interest. Due to the dangerousness of the matter in the past and also because it revolves around a relatively small niche, it seems that there was high level familiarity between these figures. The United Kingdom, a country whose literary input has abundant homoerotic tones, is a very adequate setting to analyze such a configuration.

I've been building a graph on this subject for some time, and now it seems mature enough for me to post it. It's a diagram based on friendship connections — deep or superficial —, although romantic and family-related connections are also included. Just a mutual recognition of existence isn't enough to justify a connection (otherwise most of them would be linked to Wilde!), and rivalries were not considered too. All the writers included were born during the Victorian and Edwardian eras (1837-1910), where this interconnectivity seemed particularly strong.

This is just an early version, as I imagine there is still a considerable amount of information that I missed. Therefore, I'm very open to suggestions and comments on it!

(Three Irishmen were also included in the diagram: Stoker, Wilde and Reid)

"Michael Sheen once said..."

Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) wrote to Marilyn Monroe to express his delight at the news that she was to play the part of Sadie Thompson in an adaptation of his short story Rain, which Lee Strasberg hoped to direct for NBC, but the movie was never made.

The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself. Somerset Maugham

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely. 

- Somerset Maugham

🎉 Happy Birthday to two literary giants, William Somerset Maugham and Virginia Woolf! 🎂

On this day, we celebrate not only their extraordinary contributions to literature but also their courage in being true to themselves. Both Maugham and Woolf, born on January 25th, were not only literary trailblazers but also bisexual individuals who challenged societal norms. 📚🏳️‍🌈

William Somerset Maugham, with works like "Of Human Bondage" and "The Razor's Edge", captured the human experience with unmatched precision and depth. His storytelling has touched hearts and inspired generations. 🖋️❤️💜💙 https://bi.org/en/famous/somerset-maugham

Virginia Woolf, the innovator behind "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse", revolutionized the novel and gave voice to the complexities of the human psyche. She was not only a literary pioneer but also a fearless advocate for gender equality. 📖🚺🌈 https://bi.org/en/famous/virginia-woolf

Today, we honor their literary legacies!🌟🏳️‍🌈

Happy Birthday, William Somerset Maugham and Virginia Woolf! Your words and your lives continue to inspire us all. 📜🎈

The Magician (Somerset Maugham) "The Magician is about a soon-to-be-married couple, Margaret and Arthur, crossing paths with the titular magician, Oliver Haddo, and getting their lives turned upside down. Oliver uses his knowledge of arcane magic to seduce Margaret, get her to run away with him, and to completely suppress her free will. Her friends find her and help her escape but she is almost catatonic until one night she feels Oliver's call and runs away again, unable to resist. Throughout the novel Oliver Haddo is often described as weaving webs of lies and manipulation, and his charisma allows him to effectively manipulate any crowd."

The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) "The single most famous political treatise and the first entirely secular work of The Renaissance. At the time it was first published, The Prince was seen as extremely scandalous for its endorsement of ruthlessness and amorality. Nevertheless, it quickly became popular with politicians and remains highly influential in Western politics today. While best known for the quote "And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved," he also emphasized the importance of inspiring love and respect, or at least not inspiring hatred. It is not a guide to how to most effectively be an asshole; it is simply a treatise in exercising political pragmatism. The fact that people like to connect those two ideas, that is what makes this Webby."

JANE ASHER'S PRODUCTION THE CIRCLE IS TOURING IN THE UK!

Theatre Royal, Bath (10th – 20th January 2024) Cambridge Arts Theatre (23rd – 27th January 2024) Chichester Festival Theatre (30th January – 3rd February 2024) Oxford Playhouse (6th – 10th February 2024) Festival Theatre, Malvern (13th – 17th February 2024) Richmond Theatre (20th – 24th February 2024).

Cast Lady Catherine Champion-Cheney - Jane Asher Arnold Champion-Cheney - Pete Ashmore Clive Champion-Cheney - Clive Francis Lord Porteous - Nicholas Le Prevost Teddie Luton - Chirag Benedict Lobo Elizabeth Champion-Cheney - Olivia Vinall George Murray - Robert Maskell

Director - Tom Littler Designer - Louie Whitemore Lighting Designer - Chris McDonnell Sound Designer - Max Pappenheim Assistant Director - Sam Woof Costume Supervisor - Evelien Van Camp Production LX - Amy Hill Deputy Stage Manger - Vicky Zenetzi Assistant Stage Manager - Lily Collins

Somerset Maugham's THE CIRCLE, directed by Tom Littler💍 Jane Asher (Alfie) plays Lady Kitty, a society beauty who notoriously abandoned her stuffy husband Clive (Clive Francis, The Crown), and eloped with the handsome Lord Porteous (Nicholas Le Prevost, Shakespeare in Love). Thirty years later, love’s young dream has descended into non-stop squabbling…Meanwhile, Clive and Lady Kitty’s son Arnold (Pete Ashmore, The Lovely Bones) faces the same marital fate, as his wife Elizabeth (Olivia Vinall, The Woman in White) threatens to elope with the dashing Teddie Luton (Chirag Benedict Lobo, Life of Pi). Will history come full circle? Or can one generation learn from their parents’ disastrous mistakes?

📷: Ellie Kurttz

Every day for one week, post the cover of a book you love and tag someone else to do the same.

Day #3 - "The Razor's Edge" by W. Somerset Maugham

Yes, another queer author for Pride Month! Although W. Somerset Maugham was more open about it than Thornton Wilder was. (See yesterday's post.) Maugham had close relationships with several men, including Gerald Haxton, a young American (18 year age difference) whom Maugham met in 1916 and with whom he had a long-term partnership. Haxton served as Maugham's secretary, companion, and lover, accompanying him on his travels and providing support in both personal and professional matters. Their partnership lasted until Haxton's death in 1944

"The Razor's Edge" really is about a man's search for meaning and the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment after the events of WWI. He travels through Europe and India, having encounters with different people and experiences, and comes into contact with spiritual teachers and philosophies, including Hinduism and Buddhism.

I think it's obvious why I resonated so much with the book, the book reflected my search for meaning and the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment, including traveling the world to meet various spiritual teachers and guides. The book felt true to life to me.

Tagging: @thewellbeingwarrior if you want to play along.

YOU KNEW THAT ALREADY

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”

– W. Somerset Maugham

It improves your own writing too.

The Moon and Sixpence by William Somerset Maugham (1919)

I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long. For me no poet made a falser statement than Keats when he wrote the first line of Endymion. When the thing of beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders; I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look with rapture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose : you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome. All the critic can tell you with regard to Titian’s Entombment of Christ, perhaps of all the pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look at it. What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not. But people add other qualities to beauty—sublimity, human interest, tenderness, love—because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but for a little while. The mathematician who after seeing Phèdre asked: “Qu’est-ce que ça prouve?” was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Pæstum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty. Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere. That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco than in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare than in the consummate success of Racine. Too much has been written about beauty. That is why I have written a little more. Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it : beauty is a bit of a bore.

— Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale.

From May 14, 2020: Last night I dreamed I went to after-church lunch with Barack Obama and the novelist Somerset Maugham. In the dream I was trying to think of some brilliant intellectual questions to ask them, but we ended up talking about music and books. Obama and I both talked about the last time we had each seen Amy Grant in concert. Somerset Maugham did not know who Amy Grant is, perhaps because he had died in 1965.

'Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.'

'Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.'

'No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.'

'No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.'

"The best style is the style you don't notice.'

Author Extraordinaire Somerset Maugham

The Moon and Sixpence

Charles Strickland, you grumpy genius. They want so much to sensationalise your life, but they don't know that you just don't care. The devil of art that possessed you could be satiated only by your complete nonchalance to any kind of grundyism and your monomaniac immersion into your art which so many describe as obscene, frightening. The beauty of your art is not the beauty of Michelangelo's frescoes, but the sublimity of something tremendously primeval. Your atavistic voyage and stay in Tahiti in a way redeems you from all your inhumanities to Blanche and Dick Stroeve and Mrs Strickland and your children. But what makes you stand apart so starkly is how you never indulge in the hypocrisy of the regular world but force everyone to accept if not admire your brutal honesty.

The narrator insists that he has known Strickland more intimately tham others, but there is a vanity in him for having known the origins of someone who later became known as a genius. His efforts to tell the readers the truth are in fact thinly veiled attempts to put himself on a kind of predestal too, to assure one that he is not a bourgeois philistine, but a learned art connoisseur who could recognise Strickland's misunderstood genius, which you cannot prove or disprove in the retrospect. William Somerset Maugham's novel is as impressive and entertaining as his plays and short stories, and it paints a sublime though fictionalised portraiture of the post-Impressionist/ Synthetist painter Paul Gauguin.