Word: maughams
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...SOMERSET MAUGHAM AND THE QUEST FOR FREEDOM by ROBERT LORIN CALDER 324 pages. Doubleday...
...body of the book pursues -through every novel, play and story, good, bad or silly, that Maugham ever wrote - Calder's all-purpose insight that Maugham was preoccupied with the escape from bondage. Calder has dis covered, for example, that "examined in their entirety, Maugham's works contain over 300 images concerned with liberty or enslavement...
...despite Calder's thick spectacles and some earnest overpraise, he under stands that Maugham did create several stories that are still read and several characters who are fondly remembered. Most memorable by far is Rosie, she of the pale gold hair, white breasts and happy promiscuity, whose enchanting smile suffuses Maugham's celebrated roman à clef, Cakes...
Calder's Appendix A is entitled "Rosie," and it identifies for the first time the original of the heroine. Maugham always built his most interesting characters on real people. The publication of Cakes and Ale in 1933 touched off not one but a series of literary scandals, starting with the charge that Rosie's writer husband was a caricature of Thomas Hardy. A convincing original for Rosie herself has never been proposed, though it has been argued-once to Maugham's face-that Rosie had to be the one total fiction in the book because the author...
...Maugham was furious at the suggestion. Now Calder advances proof -direct testimony supported by persuasive circumstance-that Rosie was based on a woman named Ethelwyn Sylvia Jones. As Calder reconstructs it, she was the second daughter of a minor playwright, herself an actress, beautiful, intelligent, full-blown, artlessly warmhearted. Maugham met her in 1904. Their affair lasted until...