Two men played a major role in Somerset Maugham’s life: Gerald Haxton until his death in 1944, and then Alan Searle.
In her biography of Somerset Maugham (The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Random House, 2010), whose publication William Boyd enthusiastically welcomed in The Guardian, Selina Hastings reprises an earlier biographer’s (Maugham: A Biography, Ted Morgan, Simon & Schuster, 1980) remark about Alan Searle when he met Maugham in 1928. Lytton Strachey used to call him his “Bronzino Boy.”
When they met again in the United States after the war, five years after they had last seen each other, Maugham said to him: “You may have looked like a Bronzino once, but now you look like a depraved Frans Hals,” Glenway Wescott recalled.
Rereading this biography makes me want to read The Narrow Corner and Christmas Holiday:
Christmas Holiday is first and foremost a political allegory, in which the author employs his characters to illustrate the ideological struggles in Europe, using them to personify the nature of Fascism and the totalitarian states, and the fatal malleability of the op-pressed. Unfortunately, they are all, with the exception of Charley, two-dimensional, and the lengthy relating of their various stories at secondhand grows monotonous. The only human aspect of Simon, carefully left unexplored by the author, is a strong impression that he is and always has been hopelessly in love with handsome, heterosexual Charley (thus refuting Gore Vidal’s assertion that The Narrow Corner is Maugham’s only “crypto-fag” novel).