Word: maugham
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While the British Empire fights for its life, its little private dramas-often almost as stylized as British tweeds-continue. One recurrent pattern, frequently put on paper by Somerset Maugham, is that of the Britons in India or the Far East whose ultra-British correctness is suddenly upset by tropic passion. Last week in East Africa a typical Maughamesque story appeared to be coming to feverish life...
...Maugham tale could have no better setting than the swank Muthaiga Country Club on a cooling hill outside flat, sunny Nairobi, capital of Kenya Colony. Scarcely one hour's drive from the haunts of zebra, giraffe and hartebeest, the Mut-haiga's members have built themselves a sporting retreat as refreshing as those they remember in Old England. From the club terrace, after nightfall, visitors may watch red, green and white fireflies flickering over the Kikuyu grass lawns...
Seated on the terrace one night last January was a foursome that might have stepped direct from Maugham's pages. One was sun-bronzed, handsome Josslyn Victor Hay, 39, 22nd Earl of Erroll, Hereditary High Constable of Scotland (a title conferred on his family in 1314 by Robert Bruce). He was a veteran of Mayfair, the Continental casinos, the English hunting fields and African big-game trails. Twice married, once divorced, and a recent widower, he owned and worked a large Kenya cattle farm, was active in Kenya's Legislative Council, and like a true sportsman lamented Nairobi...
...audiences, which necessitates writing her script in triple-size type. A great one for entertaining, she lives in an 18-room Beverly Hills mansion, which she has furnished ornately with French and English antiques. Among recent drop-ins have been the socially hard-to-get Aldous Huxley and Somerset Maugham. Describing the occasion, Fanny remarked, "Like jerks, we played parlor games." Most unusual of her guests is one Roger Davis, who dropped in on her in 1916, has been around ever since. She dotes on her two children (by Nicky Arnstein), is rated a good painter by the Chouinard...
...writers and intellectuals who had banded together to produce it. Its editor is a German-born exile from Nazi-occupied Czecho-Slovakia and The Netherlands: slight, balding Klaus Mann, son of Nobel Prizewinning Novelist Thomas Mann. Editorial advisers include such refugee notables as Dr. Eduard Benes, Stefan Zweig, Somerset Maugham, such native littérateurs as Playwright Robert Sherwood, Newsman Vincent Sheean, Editor (of The Nation) Freda Kirchwey, Taletellers Stephen Vincent Benét and Sherwood Anderson...