The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham
By Selina Hastings
John Murray £25, 614 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

Somerset Maugham called the French Riviera “a sunny place for shady people” and, as this engrossing biography makes clear, he was one to know. From 1927 to 1965 Maugham, then the richest, most famous writer in the world, peered out at humanity’s folly and mischief from his princely Villa Mauresque, hidden in lush foliage at the peak of Cap Ferrat.

“Ooh, Mr Maugham this is fairyland!” squealed poet Edna St Vincent Millay when she arrived to find Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton and Maugham’s lover and housekeeper Gerald Haxton on the terrace. But neither host nor guests were ever quite what they seemed.

Haxton was cruel and violent – he flung Maugham’s daughter’s puppy out of the car window on a seaside drive – and he spent evenings cruising Villefranche for rough trade. His Cockney successor Alan Searle looked like a Bronzino painting, but was whiny and dull. A staff of gilded youths stole and sold off the wine cellar, and a nephew was secretly taking notes for a newspaper exposé.

Expatriate society was stifling, but when Jean Cocteau invited Maugham to meet his neighbour Picasso, the English writer’s only question was: “Does he play b-b-bridge?” Meanwhile, Maugham’s wife Syrie attracted police attention with her dishonest antique dealing. Her pregnancy had trapped Maugham into a wedding in which he felt “so overcome with loathing for his bride that he could hardly bring himself to look at her”, followed by an expensive divorce when she became “the tart who ruined my life”, her “mouth as wide as a brothel door” in her desire to fleece him.

Maugham himself, lively, clever, ambitious, remained wretched throughout. He entertained Winston Churchill and the King of Siam, sold more books than his contemporaries, had a flamboyant sex life but regretted a “native fastidiousness” that kept his taste conservative, and concluded in old age that “though I have been in love a good many times I have never experienced the bliss of requited love. I am incapable of complete surrender”.

Selina Hastings is a virtuoso chronicler of Britain’s champagne literati, whose former subjects include Evelyn Waugh, Rosamond Lehmann and Nancy Mitford. She tells Maugham’s tale of glamorous dysfunction with charm. Her new access to letters and family testimony makes this book a definitive work, and her gently Freudian interpretation is sympathetic.

Brought up in 1870s Paris by a beautiful, warm-hearted mother who died when he was eight, Maugham never recovered from his loss, mourning Edith Maugham until his 90s, when he still slept with her photograph next to him. His father swiftly followed his mother to the grave and he was adopted at 10 by a chilly, dim provincial vicar-uncle. He endured misery at school at King’s College Canterbury, developed a stammer, froze emotionally and took decades to accept that he was “three quarters queer and a quarter straight”, as he put it, rather than the other way round.

Hastings convinces, entertains and rescues Maugham from the stereotype of flashy expatriate. She cannot, however, revive a literary reputation that had already plummeted before his death in 1965. Maugham “never pretended to be anything but a story-teller”, he said; his short stories are light and perceptive, his novels and plays now dated, and as Hastings admits “fail quite to reach the first rank”. They do not, as a result, provide the architecture needed to sustain a literary biography of this length and depth.

What remains is a brilliant evocation of the Côte d’Azur in its heyday and fading glory, and a sense, too, that after half a century of intellectual predominance, literary biography – now reduced to such second-division subjects as Maugham – has itself had its day.

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s art critic