Word: maugham
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Five years ago, having reached his allotted three-score-years-and-ten, Somerset Maugham took a long look at himself, reached for his notebook, and jotted down a sort of bank balance of his mental and physical condition. It showed...
Attitude to Maugham: "I have made the most ... of such gifts as nature provided...
...Maugham admirers had a right to expect that, with the maestro so well set and devil-may-care, his personal Notebook would be as breezy as, say, the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope (in which the old fox hunter posthumously appalled his huge public by admitting with a gay cackle that money had always been his muse). But where other note-makers have nailed their colors to the mast and let their hair down to the last soiled lovelock, urbane Maugham has preferred to soak his colors in bleach and pin his hair in a tight bun. His Notebook (the whittlings...
...snag is that few ears besides Author Maugham's are likely to pick up the trumpet call of inspiration from yesterday's commonplaces ("The [Fijian] chief who received me was a nephew of the last king and . . . was dressed in a pair of short white pants"). Moreover, though he may be forgiven for crooning in the days of his youth, "My soul seemed a stringed instrument upon which the Gods were playing a melody of despair," it is wearying, 40 years later, to hear the same theme strummed on the same wet banjo: "The moan of the wind...
...does not know," noted Maugham of a man he met in the Far East, "how many of the notions he has hammered out in suffering and meditation are lamentably commonplace ... On the other hand, now and then, he has a charming and even original thought...