Alan Searle became his companion until his death in 1965. When Haxton died in 1944, he returned to England, then in 1946 to his villa in France, where he lived until his death. In 1940, as France fell to German occupation, he fled to the United States, first to Hollywood, where he became a screenwriter. In 1928 he bought Villa Mauresque in Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, and made it into a great literary and social salon as well as his home. In June of 1917 he went to Russia for the British Secret Intelligence Service, to counter German pacifist propaganda and keep the provisional government in power, a mission which failed. In May of 1917, he married Syrie Wellcome, with whom he had had a daughter. In 1916, he and Haxton travelled to the Pacific to research his novel The Moon And Sixpence, based on the life of Paul Gauguin.
In 1915, he became a British agent operating in Switzerland against the Berlin Committee while posing as a writer. In World War I he served in France as a member of the British Red Cross's "Literary Ambulance Drivers." During the war he met Frederick Gerald Haxton who became his companion and lover until Haxton's death in 1944. He travelled and wrote, and in 1907 began to experience great success with plays as well as novels. It was published in 1897, and it became so popular that Maugham, who by this time had qualified to be a doctor, dropped medicine and began writing full-time. He continued writing nightly, and in 1897, he finished his second book, Liza of Lambeth. His uncle sent him to King's College London to study medicine, although he had been writing since the age of 20 and intended to become an author. If Toomey started out as a facsimile of Maugham, he does not end the novel that way: Burgess develops Toomey so that he is distinct from his influence, a character of Burgessian creation. Maugham’s stories have much the same influence on Earthly Powers as the character of Maugham does himself. On his return to England he worked in an accountant's office for a month, then returned to Whitstable. This resembles a story Burgess tells in the first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, in which a Tamil accuses Burgess of a similar transgression. In Germany, he wrote his first book, a biography of opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, and he met John Ellingham Brooks, with whom he had an affair. At sixteen, he refused to continue at The King's School and he was allowed to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. His uncle was cold and cruel, and the boarding school he attended, The King's School in Canterbury, was also miserable for him. Two years later, his father died of cancer, and he was sent to England to be cared for by his uncle, Henry MacDonald Maugham, the Vicar of Whitstable, in Kent. His mother died of tuberculosis while he was young, a death which traumatized him for life. William Somerset Maugham was born at the British Embassy in Paris, France, where his father was an English lawyer handling the legal affairs of the British embassy.
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