The Wrong People

INTRODUCTION

Robin Maugham, who succeeded his father as Viscount Maugham, is a nephew of the late W. Somerset Maugham. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge. During the war he fought in tanks in the Western Desert, was wounded and mentioned in dispatches. In 1945 he was called to the bar and published his first book. Since then he has travelled widely in Arab countries, Africa and the Far Fast. Several of his books have been made into films, including the highly successful film of The Servant (1964). His other books include Somerset and All the Maughams (1966), The Green Shade, The Second Widow, The Link, and his latest, which is his autobiography and entitled Escape from the Shadows.

All the characters in this novel are imaginary, and imaginary names have been invented to suit them. If by any chance the author has used the name of a living person he apologizes.

Melton Hall approved school is also imaginary; unfortunately the incidents described there are not.

PREFACE

When Robin Maugham showed the first rough draft of this novel to his uncle, Somerset Maugham made two comments: that it was the first novel for years that he had been obliged to read straight through at one sitting and that the writer must never publish it under his own name. “They’ll murder you.” I assumed that the “they” were the critics and that Maugham, so careful himself, felt the time was not yet ripe for an erotic homosexual thriller like The Wrong People to be openly avowed by its distinguished author. But now I’m not so sure. I think Maugham meant by “they” the irate homosexuals themselves. The reader must be his own judge. Times have changed so much since Maugham’s death that the subject matter of The Wrong People seems tame indeed; these guilt-ridden Anglo-Saxons have been bypassed by the confessions of Californian male prostitutes or queens of drag from Brooklyn or even by those more truly Tangier writers, William Burroughs and Paul Bowles. Why then does it appeal to us? Robin Maugham is not an imaginative artist but, like his uncle, a story-teller. His novel is very well constructed; as a thriller it holds remarkably well together.

Every incident, every piece of dialogue has its place in the story as it builds up from the first page. “Each sentence even—all had been carefully planned.” And it is particularly revealing about homosexuals in the ways in which they differ from the norm; despite the new permissiveness of the age of the consenting adult these repressed puritanical types of English and Eastern American expatriates do still form impressive minorities, gathered together in enclaves in the warmer corners of the world since the Wildean exodus. Maugham understands the temperament and the particular predicament of the rich homosexual who uses his money to corrupt and suborn yet longs for a genuine relationship with a young man whom he can educate to share higher pleasures and who will love him for himself. Such relationships (“Tim” is typical) are doomed to either infidelity or boredom. Diaghilev can never hold Nijinsky…