Word: maughams
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...Eliot, 60, got a nice hand from one of his elders. "I think we all ought to be glad," observed Somerset Maugham, 75, "to have lived long enough to read his poetry...
Novelist Somerset Maugham, visiting friends in San Francisco to celebrate his 75th birthday, had something pleasant to remember. "The nicest compliment ever paid me," he announced, "was a letter from a G.I. in the Pacific during the war, who wrote me that he had read an entire story of mine without having to look up a single word in the dictionary...
...Girls. Her career has held few disappointments. One of the biggest was Somerset Maugham's refusal to let her play Sadie Thompson in Rain in 1925. * She was so depressed by losing the part that she cast herself in the role of a would-be suicide and swallowed a handful of aspirins ; but she woke up next morning feeling better than she had for a long time. Another big disappointment, years later, was not getting the lead in Gone With the Wind...
Portrait of Humility. Unexpectedly, however, this shrewd and seasoned work is very nearly a first-rate novel. It becomes so, not by virtue of Maugham's mastery of form, great as it is, or his humor, of which too much has been made, nor his skepticism, which sometimes grows wearisome. It is distinguished for its portrait of Bishop Blasco de Valero. The devout prelate, self-sacrificing, presiding with terrible humility and conscientiousness over the trials of heretics, is a masterly portrait, equal to Maugham's best, and belonging well up in the gallery of modern fiction...
...when the imagination has been darkened by the horrors of the concentration camps, this simple, scrupulous man is an imaginative achievement. His genuine anguish when he fails to work the miracle very nearly wrecks the novel; his concentrated and intelligent fanaticism certainly spoils the aloof ironic tone that Maugham otherwise sustains throughout the book. But it may be that his earnestness will, in the long run, make Maugham's last novel, almost in spite of himself, be judged among his best...