Books: mIGHT-hAVE-bEEN

DON FERNANDO—W. Somerset Maugham—Doubleday,Doran ($2.50).

When William Somerset Maugham was 23, he wrote a little book on Spain called The Land of the Blessed Virgin. Having escaped uncongenial work in a London hospital, free for the first time, he fell pleasantly in love in Seville, where he was made a “pretty fool of.” An inexperienced author, he hesitated about writing the story of his love affair, compromised by turning out a book of sketches the mature Maugham was to dismiss as “crude and gushing.” Despite his impulse to try again, despite his deep love for Spain, he could never find a Spanish character or theme to satisfy him. He wanted to write a romantic historical novel, rejected the story of Ponce de León because Ponce de León had left Spain and journeyed where Author Maugham would not follow.

Unmindful of literary bores who tell the plots of stories they hope to write, Author Maugham in Don Fernando subtly recreates the atmosphere in which his unwritten novel was to have been laid. A master of indirection, he begins unobtrusively with an account of contemporary Don Fernando, fat, dirty tavern keeper who forced on him a biography of Saint Ignatius Loyola. Ignatius, who disappointed a noble family, sacrificed his influence with the great, and in the flower of his youth went to live among the poor, captured Author Maugham’s imagination. He visited the town where Loyola had suffered, even attempted some of Loyola’s milder exercises for mortifying the flesh, but only made himself ill without ecstasy. Bringing his imagination more sharply into focus, he peered through the popular novels of that spectacular moment of Spanish history in order to visualize the dusty, hungry, breakneck life of the common people. The amazing fertility of Lope de Vega, who wrote 2,200 plays, the cool, sinister elegance of El Greco, the salty, practical fervor of Saint Teresa gave Author Maugham a hint of the stormy intellectual and artistic climate in which his projected characters would live.

Lope de Vega was acutely conscious of his honor, but when crossed in love revenged himself by writing scurrilous verses about his mistress’ family. He wrote 20 pages a day and composed more than 200 full-length comedies in 24 hours each. Getting 50 ducats a play, he was the only professional writer among Spain’s great. “When the younger generation came knocking at the door he firmly put his foot against it.” Saint Teresa was a great saint but she was also a handsome woman who cried out when she saw her portrait: “God forgive you for having painted me, Brother John, for you have painted me ugly and blear-eyed.”

Excess characterized the Spaniards. They lived so intensely that Author Maugham eventually came to the conclusion that their careers had been their great contri-butions to art—their lives were their poems. Like Fray Luis de León, they were haughty, tender with children, quarrelsome, rude, violent, and always yearning for peace. They conquered half the world and usually went hungry at home. Don Fernando is no substitute for the great novel Author Maugham wanted to write out of their contradictory lives, serves only to suggest what might have been written. As a guide through 16th Century Spain, civilized and weary Author Maugham can only stare at the remote peaks of great personalities, shrouded in spiritual and earthly passions that he cannot share.