Somerset Maugham: (Writers and Their Work)

During his life-time Somerset Maugham was unquestionably one of the most successful English authors of the twentieth century. He desired passionately to succeed and was always keenly conscious of the needs of the market, but he also desired to be praised by the best judges, and here his ambition was far less fully gratified. Neither the academics nor, with rare exceptions, the Bloomsbury group, which strongly influenced English literary journalism, deigned to regard him as a creative writer worth taking seriously. In this essay which succeeds John Brophy's study, No. 22 in the series, Anthony Curtis surveys Maugham's achievements as a novelist, short-story writer, dramatist, travel writer and literary critic. He notes as a general characteristic Maugham's powers as an observer; his highly developed visual sense and his keen awareness of surroundings and material objects. By comparison the appeal of the other senses makes little impact through Maugham's prose. A biographical sketch is interwoven with the critical appreciation and this makes the point that Maugham's discovery early in life of his homosexual nature may have influenced the stance which dominates his fiction, that of the detached and sardonic observer, the non-committal recorder of experience. Elsewhere the essay examines the contrast between the Maugham type of story, modelled on Maupassant, which moves in its author's words ‘in an even line from its exposition to its close’, with the more impressionistic and poetic variety of narrative art developed by Chekhov, to which Maugham himself pays tribute, as filling the reader ‘with an overpowering sense of the mystery of life.’ Summing up, Mr Curtis sees Maugham as a literary conservative, who believed in the power of linear narrative and descriptive realism at a time when greater writers were breaking with this tradition, and who succeeded in demonstrating what was worth preserving in it. Anthony Curtis, literary editor of the Financial Times, is a well-known journalist and critic. His series of talks on the contemporary novel and modern biography have been broadcast both on the world and UK services of BBC radio. His critical study, The Pattern of Maugham appeared at the time of the Maugham centenary in 1974, and was followed two years later by a pictorial biography of Maugham.