Word: maughams
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Trio. Somerset Maugham escorts three more of his short stories to the screen; with Jean Simmons, James Hayter, Nigel Patrick (TIME...
...professor and an absent-minded Roman emperor. At 55, with more than a quarter-century of serious writing behind him, he is best known to U.S. readers for Memoirs of Hecate County, a book of turgid intellectual short stories laced with enough sex to get them widely banned. Somerset Maugham, a more successful storywriter, whom Wilson calls a "half-trashy novelist . . . patronized by half-serious readers," considers Hecate County "so execrably bad you wonder whether it's worth reading what he has to say about other people's novels...
Tedium & Hilarity. A less bitter critic than Maugham will not wonder long, after dipping into Classics and Commercials. It has all of Wilson's occasional faults: casual superciliousness, high-brow reserve, lack of warmth. But it also illustrates most of his more important virtues: a literary curiosity that ranges from horror stories and a life of John Barrymore to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and the precious hot-house blooms of Ronald Fir-bank (TIME, Nov. 21, 1949), an oldfashioned, discursive style, an artful way of saying exactly what a writer is up to while explaining...
...masterful or stupid middle-aged women are a special excellence, and so are his pompous fathers. Undershaft is convincing as a human being. A very vain man, Shaw was a connoisseur of vanities and his collection is not wounding or disheartening-as it is, say, in smaller writers like Maugham-largely because Shaw is warmed by the fire of a natural affinity. Only a clumsiness of plot-Shaw was not a natural plot-maker, but a reckless piler on of the grotesque for satirical reasons-distorts the focus in which character is seen. The clear failures are his Cockneys; they...
Trio. Another helping of Somerset Maugham short stories; with James Hayter, Nigel Patrick and Jean Simmons (TIME...