Word: maughams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Rich beyond most writers' dreams, Maugham became a kind of semipublic personage, a figure of Edwardian origin and habits, projecting an Ed wardian image on modern scenes. He looked like a character from one of his own novels: heavily lined patrician features, thin lips turned down at the corners, hooded eyes. Traveling the world in search of stories, he napped after lunch wherever he happened to be-aboard a tramp ship plowing the South Seas, in a Burmese hut or an outrigger canoe. Churchill, Wells, Cocteau, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Kings of Sweden and Siam called...
...this, he was often described as a mere storyteller. Today, after Joyce and Freud, "storyteller" is somehow considered a term of denigration, and critics may reasonably question the depth of Maugham's insights. But he was able to do supremely well what storytellers are supposed to do-to dramatize character by putting that character into action, a specific action that displays in kinetic terms his or her faults and virtues...
...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...Maugham was by nature, and by his own admission, cold and withdrawn.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...