Word: maughams
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Painting the Veil, Mr. Maugham Does Not Gild the Lily
East of Suez. Pola Negri has a new coif, and no becoming one at that. Much less inflaming than usual, she writhes her way through W. Somerset Maugham's play about a Eurasienne, who was shanghaied, in the city of that name, by a yellow gentleman with enormous talons and discomfiting eyes. Before that she had planned to marry a young Britisher (Edmund Lowe). Afterwards she married her rescuer (Rockcliffe Fellows). There are sentiment, sobs, horror, passiont close-ups-far east of Suez...
...Greenmantle, Midwinter, The Three Hostages (one of the finest romances of modern times) was in Manhattan the other day for a few hours. Lieutenant Colonel John Buchan is a short, quiet-spoken, modest English author. In those characteristics, he is like Walter de la Mare and W. Somerset Maugham, our other English visitors of the moment. They arrived without blaring of trumpets-and both Buchan and Maugham departed quietly, after seeing a few things at the theatre and saying "how-do-you-do-goodbye" to a few friends...
...proper to the entire company. A certain prosaic literalness and timorous aversion from the loftier strains of prose perhaps comes nearer than any other quality to providing a measure for the book as a whole; at best, it is little above mediocrity. There is a ghost story by Somerset Maugham, for instance, in which the author describes an uncanny scene in the most matter of fact terms, no doubt believing this the certain means of investing the supernatural with reality. The story cannot help reminding the reader of "The Phantom Rickshaw", an unfortunate recollection, for Mr. Maugham has been matter...
...Melancholy Adventure", might have been the greatest story in the book; might even have been the greatest story. But in this instance, as in Mr. Maugham's ghost story, the author failed through the attempt to make the commonplace suggest the emotional. Mr. Boyd loses his laurels by pure timidity. No doubt one says less than he means, and it is an offense to open the heart; but Mr. Boyd plods with matter of fact foot along a path where Merrick would have sung with "voice memorial". Perhaps it is not timidity that led Mr. Boyd astray; he sinned...