Word: maughams
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...Camel's Back. Playwright Maugham herein concerned himself with an irresponsible investigation of the regions of the utterly inane. He involved himself in such a feathery swirl of epigram and complication that along in Act II he found that he simply could not make his wits' ends meet. He gave up trying...
Concentrating on the conversation -which is steadily diverting and occasionally dazzling-one is led to suspect that Mr. Maugham, retiring after a particularly amusing dinner party, stopped Jong enough between his collar and his braces to jot down the smartest of the evening's causerie. On second thought, the play is altogether too smoothly starched for that. Mr. Maugham must have written it in a full dress suit...
...heat, disease, fever, and death in the midst of a polyglot community of picturesque but unattractive traders (and scoundrels), ignorant and unpleasant savages, and an anomalous horde of half-castes, to say nothing of his pet aversions, the Presbyterian missionaries and the "Orstrylyun" bagmen. There is more of Somerset Maugham than...
...work among the poor in the slum areas of Battersea and Lambeth that undoubtedly inspired his first serious work, Liza of Lambeth. To the clinic at St. Thomas's where he studied, the poor of the district came seeking medical aid. Maugham found their souls more interesting than their bodily ills. He drew upon them for the characters of Liza, of Liza's mother, of Jim and Tom. The first book contained only a shadow of the future bitterness of Maugham's work. In Mrs. Craddock his sense of the mixture of tragedy and comedy is almost...
...sweep and power of dramatic passion and an ability to analyze it- always cynically. It was interesting to watch him the other evening with Charlie Chaplin-Chaplin, mobile, eager, gay, as vivid as a flame and as naive as Peter Pan, yet somehow as subtle as life itself; Somerset Maugham, bending toward him, quiet, dark, reserved, cynical, observant, interpretative. They are both geniuses-they almost represent the two types of genius-spontaneous creation of life and analytical sounding of the human mind...