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A singular life in books and film, as told by Adrian Wootton
This year, at Noir in Festival, our talks devoted to personalities connected with the great tradition of the mystery genre continue, curated for us by Adrian Wootton, OBE and Chief Executive of Film London, previously director of LFF, the National Film Theatre, and the Crime Scene Festival. The literary light in question this year is William Somerset Maugham, one of the fathers of the 20th-century English novel. Maugham studied philosophy in Heidelberg and medicine in London, and served as a Red Cross driver in World War I (like Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos), but made a name for himself just before the war broke out, as a writer and playwright, then, after the Second World War, as a screenwriter in Hollywood. While several of his novels, such as Of Human Bondage, The Razor’s Edge, The Moon and Sixpence, and The Painted Veil quickly became modern classics, the film business honed in on his work as early as 1915, adapting his novel The Explorer, and his filmography boasts over thirty titles, some Oscar® winners.
Less well known is Maugham’s career as a spy. A conflicted, shy and insecure person with a stammer, bisexual, with a passion for travel and adventure, during the First World War he worked for British Intelligence on the continent and was sent to Switzerland and Russia on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, serving under Sir William Wiseman, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (later called M16). Taciturn and observant, Maugham had just the right temperament to work as a secret service agent and believed he had inherited from his father, an attorney, the gift of impartial judgment and never being deceived by appearances.
Maugham never lost a chance to turn real life into literature and drew on his career as a secret agent to create a series of short stories in which the protagonist is a sophisticated, elegant, lone wolf of a spy. His book Ashenden inspired Ian Fleming to write his James Bond series. And agent Ashenden’s adventures also inspired Alfred Hitchcock to make his 1936 film Secret Agent. Indeed, Hitchcock often declared that Maugham was one of his favorite writers.
This remarkable combination of spywork, acclaimed novels and box office successes will be the subject of Adrian Wootton’s talk on December 3rd at 11 a.m., in the Sala dei 146 at IULM University.
