Word: maugham
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CREATURES OF CIRCUMSTANCE (314 pp.)-W. Somerset Maugham-Doubleday...
...Somerset Maugham wrote, at 65: "The profession of authorship is on the whole a healthy one and authors are apt to live on long after they have given the world whatever of significance they had to offer." Still healthy at 73, "Willie" Maugham finds the manufacture of short stones without significance a habit he can't shuck...
...this latest collection of magazine stories, Creatures of Circumstance, his yarns are as well made as ever, and as full of Maugham's slick brand of irony. Readers will find them useful on long train rides; it is possible to read them while thinking of something else and lose nothing of value in the process. Having nothing to write about, Maugham once wrote in answer to his critics, is "the most inconclusive reason for not writing that I've ever heard...
Creatures of Circumstance contains just one disclaimer to Maugham's candid admission that "I'm a tired old party. . . . At my age, the spark begins to dim." The exception is The Unconquered, a story about occupied France in which a French girl is raped by a German soldier. Later the soldier comes back, learns that the girl is pregnant, falls in love with her and wants to marry her. In her hatred for the German and what he symbolizes, she refuses, drowns his child on the day it is born...
Others, from the familiar Maugham mold...