Word: maugham
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...MAUGHAM by Ted Morgan; Simon & Schuster; 711 pages...
Early in The Moon and Sixpence, William Somerset Maugham wrote, "Sometimes a man survives a considerable time from an era in which he had his place into one which is strange to him, and then the curious are offered one of the most singular spectacles in the human comedy." Maugham was 45 when that novel was published in 1919; he had another 46 years ahead of him. But even a novelist of his energy could not have imagined a life that began with Victoria on the throne and ended with the crowning of the Beatles...
Prophecy was not one of Maugham's interests. He was an unblinking realist, a doctor who narrowed his vision to examine the frailer aspects of human nature. He fortified himself against fickleness and changing fashions with wealth, influential acquaintances and property; he veiled his own nature, lied to biographers and journalists, manipulated friends and paid for affection. His long career now seems part of geology, with its upthrusts, weatherings and glaciations...
...with nightmarish surrealism, as attempts to "paraphrase the intellectual and emotional essence of reality." Although a rendering of Sir Winston Churchill at 80 was publicly reviled by its subject ("It makes me look half-witted, which I ain't"), it was Sutherland's portraits of W. Somerset Maugham, Helena Rubinstein and other notables that brought him his greatest fame...
Singer has never had greater command of his material. At times he is the Jewish Somerset Maugham, spinning yarns of jealousy and violence with the detached tone of a narrator who just happened to be on the scene when the gun went off. At other instances he is a Kafkaesque master of the parable. At still others he is as comic and trenchant as Saul Bellow: a pretentious artist declares, "I must create. This is a physical need with me." A writer who consents to meet with a wealthy vulgarian is enticed with promises: "In the other world, a huge...