Books: Old Master Maugham

AH KING—Somerset Maugham—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Somerset Maugham is the fiction editor’s Santa Claus. His stones are intelligent but not highbrow, well-made but not wooden, readable but not offensively scandalous. They are like the quiet but compelling conversation of a man who has seen the world and not missed much to the point. Sentimentalists find Maugham cynical, but in fact he is a psychological realist. Even sentimentalists find his common-sense melodramas refreshing after a surfeit of romance. This collection of stories is dedicated to one Ah King, a Onetime Chinese servant of Author Maugham’s, who traveled with him for six months, served his master perfectly but inhumanly, surprised him when they said good-bye by shedding tears. The title’s only relevance is the fact that Author Maugham thought up these stories while Ah King was his servant. Some of them: A married woman and her lover, about to become illegitimate parents, kill the husband, marry and live happily ever after, with no pangs of remorse. A model of devotion to the rest of the community are a planter and his half-sister who keeps house for him. When the planter marries, his sister kills herself; the community discovers they were living in incest. The worst white man on a little island attracts the attention of a withered spinster-missionary; to the amused amazement of everyone except the predatory virgin, she conquers him. The man-eating Russian wife of a Scottish scientist tries to get her claws on her husband’s priggish young assistant; his heredity and the environment of a storm rescue him, ruin her. A red-blooded Britisher, finding himself a cuckold, prepares to do the traditionally manly thing; takes wiser advice in time.