Gerald Haxton

Gerald Haxton was an American expatriate best known as the long-term companion and secretary of the British writer W. Somerset Maugham. Their relationship combined personal intimacy, practical literary assistance and extensive travel across Europe, Asia and the Pacific.

Haxton was an American expatriate who became Somerset Maugham’s intimate companion and secretary for roughly three decades. Their extensive travels through Asia, Europe and the Pacific shaped Maugham’s social world and supplied settings and observations that entered his writing.

In Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, Gerald Haxton travels to Penang as W. Somerset Maugham’s secretary, companion and lover, sharing the precarious private life that Maugham’s public marriage helps conceal. At Cassowary House, Haxton is part of the intimate setting in which Maugham searches for material among Lesley Hamlyn’s memories of colonial scandal and revolution. The novel uses their relationship to underline the gap between the respectable identity required of a celebrated writer and the personal attachments that shaped his travels and work.