Word: maughamism
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This richly documented chronicle of Churchill's first four decades by the versatile biographer and journalist (Maugham; Rowing Toward Eden) catches Churchill on all fours. Here, the world statesman is still a vote-grabbing politician, and the supreme war strategist a romantic blunderer. The omnipresent cigar, the V sign and the stentorian voice on the wireless are a World War away...
...century, "out of date with his time." Findley's Mauberley rushes to catch up with his century. Cowering in a crumbling Alpine hotel that has seen grander times and better people, he writes a graffiti testament in rooms once occupied by the likes of Isadora Duncan and Somerset Maugham. He has barely finished when someone stabs him. The body and the writing are found by American soldiers, liberators of the death camps. Captain Freyberg, a fanatical Nazi-hunter who ironically places the Dachau gate sign, ARBEIT MACHT FREI (Work shall set you free), over his desk, checks off Mauberley...
Though it has but one monarch, England does not lack for regally imperious voices. Mrs. St. Maugham (Constance Cummings) is a dowager queen who rules a country house, or seems to. She thunders out non sequiturs in the accents of invincibility. She is half dotty, half a sage and always right. As she tells Miss Madrigal (Irene Worth), who has applied for the post of governess to her granddaughter: "Now that there are no subject races, one must be served by the mad, the sick and those who can't take their places in the outside world...
While 14-year-old Laurel (Sallyanne Tackus), Mrs. St. Maugham's granddaughter, may not be certifiably mad, she does lead a bizarre fantasy life. She claims to have seen her father commit suicide when she was twelve, though he died of an alcoholic liver. In that same year, she insists, she was raped in Hyde Park, though this is her symbolic retaliation for her mother's remarriage. She is also a live-in pyromaniac who blithely announces: "I set fire to things...
...specific gravity of Irene Worth's mode of delivery banishes frivolity and inspires conviction, as does the work of Constance Cummings and Donal Donnelly. Mrs. St. Maugham may not have been named that for nothing since The Chalk Garden measures human character with Maugham's skeptic...