Books: Somerset Maugham

He Picks up the Oddments and Remainders of Life Ever since I read Of Human Bondage I have wanted to meet W. Somerset Maugham. Here is a man with bitter truth in his work, with brilliance in his execution, with a sense of grim tragedy and deep irony. Now he is in Manhattan rehearsing a new play. He seldom stops long anywhere. He travels constantly, seeking out the bizarre places of the world, studying people and customs, picking up stray bits of character, strange events, and filling his notebooks generously with them.

Maugham is dark, pale — with eager, somewhat quizzical eyes. He is detached. I cannot imagine his being perturbed. His speech is slow and his anecdotes are brilliantly effective. He strikes me as a man who sits outside of life watching with almost cat-like eagerness. He understands life too well, he is top aware of events to treat them with tenderness. Perhaps this is because he was at one time a doctor —or, at least, took a degree in medicine.

It was his work among the poor in the slum areas of Battersea and Lambeth that undoubtedly inspired his first serious work, Liza of Lambeth. To the clinic at St. Thomas’s where he studied, the poor of the district came seeking medical aid. Maugham found their souls more interesting than their bodily ills. He drew upon them for the characters of Liza, of Liza’s mother, of Jim and Tom. The first book contained only a shadow of the future bitterness of Maugham’s work. In Mrs. Craddock his sense of the mixture of tragedy and comedy is almost at its best—the same sort of thing which in its more precise form is seen in plays such as Our Betters and The Circle and short stories such as Rain.

He was born in Paris and was educated in English schools. His father was a solicitor. He attended Heidelberg, and took his degree in medicine at St. Thomas’s Hospital, Lambeth. His plays have been produced with varying success. Both as a dramatist and novelist he possesses, it seems to me, two distinct qualities: a feeling for the sweep and power of dramatic passion and an ability to analyze it— always cynically. It was interesting to watch him the other evening with Charlie Chaplin—Chaplin, mobile, eager, gay, as vivid as a flame and as naive as Peter Pan, yet somehow as subtle as life itself; Somerset Maugham, bending toward him, quiet, dark, reserved, cynical, observant, interpretative. They are both geniuses—they almost represent the two types of genius—spontaneous creation of life and analytical sounding of the human mind.