Word: maughams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...story concerns the observations of an aging writer at an Antibes hotel. He is a kind of latter-day Maugham, who is taken with a gangly Georgy girl honeymooning with her "very sensitive" husband. A pair of prattling pederasts are taken in turn with the husband, and the writer watches with quiet horror as they gaily go about seducing the young husband-even using the writer's own harmless affection for the girl as a cover. The writer at length bows out. "If [the husband] has the wrong hormones," he wistfully but urbanely muses, "I have the wrong...
...dinner party 30 years ago, Somerset Maugham turned to his hostess and, in one of his rare pronouncements on writers and writing, remarked that the future of English literature was in the hands of a handsome young man across the room, Christopher Isherwood. Not long afterward Isherwood abdicated; in 1936, he emigrated to California and left much of his creative vitality in England. Apparently only Irish expatriates write better when they leave their native land...
...Maugham was exaggerating, he at least had a point. Isherwood writes so well that his recent brief, cameolike novels, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man and now A Meeting by the River, surpass most of the encyclopedic psychodramas produced by men laboring under weightier careers...
...plot meanders down the familiar path to self-discovery that earlier pilgrims-Aldous Huxley, Maugham himself-have trod before. The hero is Oliver, who, like Isherwood, has become fascinated by Oriental mysticism. He decides to become a monk-a step that Isherwood considered but never took-and goes to India to become a swami. On the eve of the final vow-taking, his elder brother Patrick, a London publisher and one of the most cheerfully decadent characters in recent fiction, appears at Oliver's monastery by the Ganges. Unable to leave so much integrity untouched, Patrick tempts Oliver with...
...tales in Tales of Manhattan are based on events in the firm of Arnold & Degener, 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza. The fictional partnership that handles this work could be called Maupassant, Maugham, Cozzens & Auchincloss. This firm is choosy about cases; any messy divorce work is discreetly referred to O'Hara, O'Hara, O'Hara & O'Hara, 10 North Frederick Street, Gibbsville...