The House of Doors

Willie, the fictionalized version of English writer W. Somerset Maugham, is the second protagonist and narrator in The House of Doors. The novel finds Willie in a moment of transition, just before the release of his upcoming book and as he learns that he has lost his fortune in a failed investment scheme. Willie thus continually struggles between the need for publicity and the need for secrecy; as a famous writer, his travels are well-documented, and he gives interviews to drum up sales of his upcoming book. He simultaneously hides his relationship with Gerald Hatton from the world and hides his financial insolvency from Gerald—though he hides neither of these particularly well. Willie is pulled between his self-aggrandizement in mythologizing the role of the writer and his feelings of defeat when he struggles with writers’ block.

As a character often caught between opposites, Willie symbolizes various personas at various points in the novel. When he longs to hear more of Lesley’s story, he takes on the role of a reader, even as, at the same time, he inhabits the role of the writer—as he plans to write her story for his own. In his friendship with Robert, he is both a newcomer (as the two have been parted for many years) and an old friend. Willie works to enlighten Lesley to the way she has been ignorant to the plight of gay men in a world where gay sex is criminalized while ignoring his own complicity in cultural appropriation. Willie exhibits little change throughout the novel, ending it as stuck between competing forces as he was when it began.

Robert Hamlyn is Lesley’s husband and serves primarily as a foil to Lesley in the novel. While Lesley spends considerable time thinking about her husband’s actions, she infrequently dwells on his interiority, which, in turn, gives readers little view to Robert’s wants, aside from moving to South Africa to aid a lung illness he contracted fighting in World War I. Robert’s affair (eventually revealed to be with his secretary, Peter Ong) is one of the inciting incidents in Lesley’s 1910 narrative; as Lesley never discusses this affair, or his sexuality, with him directly, the novel offers no direct insight into Robert’s perspective on these topics. Robert is represented in W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Letter” as Robert Combie, the husband of Leslie Combie, the Ethel Proudlock character.