Word: maugham
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...Maugham cites his own example. He once met a dull couple at a dull dinner. The man had been a civil servant in Asia, and the only memorable thing about him was that he was a onetime drunk, taking a bottle to bed with him every night and finishing it before morning. His wife seemed a drab mediocrity, but she had cured her husband of drink. Out of this, Maugham contrived a superb story (Before the Party), which begins in a prim country dwelling, turns into a confession by the fat widow that she had slashed her backsliding husband...
Well, how many wives married to drunkards have not had the same impulse? And gone on to parties? Or take the case of Rain. Maugham saw a prostitute hurry aboard his Tahiti-bound boat. A missionary and his wife were also aboard, and on arrival in Pago Pago, the group was thrown into quarantine because of a measles epidemic. Maugham added a tropical rain season to the measles, and made the confrontation of missionary and whore into a classic contest between righteousness and sin. What man (or clergyman) has not felt the visceral taint of the sensual in his ostensibly...
...Maugham was by nature, and by his own admission, cold and withdrawn. "There are very few people who know anything about me. And even they do not know as much as they imagine." He was a watcher, not a participant...
...afflicted with a humiliating stammer, the young Maugham recoiled in misery from the hostile new environment. At the vicarage, his uncle pumped him so full of religion that Maugham ultimately rejected God; he remained a nonbeliever all his life. At King's School in Canterbury, classmates and even the headmaster mocked his speech impediment. These unhappy transplanted years were later to appear in Of Human Bondage, the most intensely autobiographical of his novels. Even years later, he was unable to read it without tears...
...writer in Maugham emerged at medical school in London, where before getting his degree he waded systematically, if surreptitiously, through the classics and published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, in 1897. Maugham was 23. Liza was only a modest success, but on the strength of it, he abandoned medicine for good...