Word: maugham
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...lack; patience not merely in one reading but in many. For a long time, too, it was easy to misjudge Eliot, thanks to certain of his admirers, as the mere precious laureate of a Harvardian coterie. But that time, fortunately, is well past. So levelheaded a man as Somerset Maugham has recently (in his Introduction to Modern English & American Literature-anthology; TIME, May 24) done both poetry and plain readers a notable service by introducing Eliot to a large audience, without talking down and without so much as mentioning his "obscurity," as "the greatest poet of our time...
INTRODUCTION To MODERN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE-W. Somerset Maugham-The New Home Library (69c). "A selection of the most readable writing of the last 50 years," Introduction covers a wide range, gives high value at an unusually low price. Along with noted poets (Eliot, Auden, Hardy, Yeats, etc.) are examples from the lesser known (Roy Campbell, James Agee, etc.). The prose writings are also various: Churchill on Dunkirk, stories by Henry James, Eudora Welty, James Thurber, sayings by Logan Pearsall Smith, essays by Aldous Huxley and E. M. Forster, letters by John Jay Chapman, etc. Author Maugham steps...
...Somerset Maugham can spin a colorful yarn out of those aspects of human relations that usually lurk in literary backgrounds but rarely appear boldly as the central theme of a story. At times a bit maudlin, the English novelist has avoided stereotyped sentimentalities in "The Moon and Sixpence," and Warner's has followed faithfully with a moving cinema rendition of the tale of simmering desires and explosive emotional escapes...
...Herculean task of portraying Maugham's derelict hero, in his progressive states of degeneracy falls to Hollywood's ablest young character actor, George Sanders. Delicately he begins as the solid English bank-clerk husband, who suddenly is transformed into a callous wife-beating artist. And then Sanders has the picture to himself, for he storms through the following scenes with the biting venom of a freed tiger, trampling helter-skelter over lesser beings, tyrannizing those who are attracted to him, kicking away the happiness of those who happen to be in his way. Finally the human juggernaut comes to rest...
...Maugham's story is no rose, either. Sanders plays Strickland as well as Strickland can be played, but this unmotivated, anglicized Gauguin doesn't smell very sweet by this name or any other. He acts more like a beachcomber than an artist and the only glimpse you get of his masterpieces supports this conclusion. He is fascinatingly immoral and bitter, but without reason, and, from what the film shows, his painting is secondary to chess, absinthe, and seduction...