Word: maughams
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...SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Kim Novak and Laurence Harvey in Of Human Bondage (1964), Somerset Maugham's classic story of unrequited love in Edwardian England...
...Perhaps what gives her writing its peculiar tang," wrote Somerset Maugham, "is her gift for seeing something to laugh at in the bitterest tragedies of the human animal." Her own life started in bitter circumstances. She was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 in West End, N.J., of a Scotch mother who died during her infancy and a Jewish father who died, leaving her penniless, when she was in her teens...
...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...