Conversations with Willie

Whilst interesting, and at times entertaining, I couldn't help but feel that this small book, which essentially charts Maugham's senile decline, was a prurient and opportunistic attempt by Robin Maugham to cash in on his uncle.

In this I am reminded of Robin's notorious and successful attempt to blackmail the elder Maugham in 1962. Having informed his uncle that the American publisher Victor Weybright had offered him an advance of $50,000 to write Maugham's biography, Robin pointed out that he couldn't afford to turn down such a good offer. Maugham saw the writing on the wall, Robin having been privy to his erotic and emotional involvements with other men since he was a teenager, and so he responded by sending Robin a check for the equivalent amount. Robin then gave his word that he would never write a biography of Maugham. “I'm really awfully shy about all this, but I'm also very ­grateful,” he said.

This book is by no means a biography. But it does represent a breaking of Robin's word, and ultimately it is an own-goal. By the end I had a developed a far greater regard for the waspish, senile Maugham than for his duplicitous nephew.