Word: somerset
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Moon and Sixpence (United Artists) films Somerset Maugham's famed novel more faithfully than any book has ever been filmed before. The result, despite the efforts of a superb cast, is more like a still life than a moving picture...
Died. Ernest Bramah Smith (pen name: Ernest Bramah), 74, British writer of detective fiction (The Wallet of Kai Lung, Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, Max Carrados); in Somerset, England. A popular writer for some 40 years, he managed to keep his private life so private that little was known about him except that he had once lived in China, the scene of his famed Kai Lung stories. His widow asked that the place he died in be permitted to remain unnamed...
...years ago. Those of you who heard Frankic Newton's broadcast last Sunday remember the sensitive guitar strummings and down to earth blues singing by Joshua White. Josh White accompanied Libby Hofman, who learned to sing the blues from him, over at the Balinese Room of the Somerset this past week. He has produced three fine albums, devoted especially to his songs, but a musician of his accomplishments is just another Negro to the innkeepers of Commonwealth Avenue. Of the leading local hotels, only the Ritz would let him sign the register, and they informed him there that the management...
That wasn't all, however. White was only grudgingly permitted even to rehearse within the exclusive walls of the Somerset. Apparently he was to materialize in the Balinese Room in time for the program and evaporate as soon as he had twanged his final chord. His brother, who is in the Army, visited him one night, with the result that one of the bigwigs of the management foamed and ranted and all but had the soldier thrown out. It's the sort of story that keeps the Afro-American and the Chicago Defender well supplied with copy...
...Oppenheim's free life. But it makes a memorable last section to his book. The Oppenheims had a chance to leave France on the overcrowded, death-ridden ship Somerset Maugham described in his Strictly Personal. They left via Spain. The crawling trains were crammed with human misery. Everything whereby Oppenheim had lived -his money, his reputation, his dignity-had lost its value. What happened to the old couple was quite unimportant. Their self-concern in the midst of a collapsing world is grotesque. But this sense of futile nullity in the face of crushing impersonal forces gives to Oppenheim...