Collected Short Stories Vol 2

*****/*****                                                                                                               Short Story

Collected Short Stories Vol 2

W. Somerset Maugham

‘Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent but not a few, read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy.’ Thus, William Somerset Maugham summarised reading habits. Every individual who belongs in the last category has realised how exasperating and tiring, at times, a search for a simple delightful book of fiction can be. But reading is his life and the book in his hands is akin to the air he breathes. There are times when he longs for a clean unpolluted air, for, much of the modern and post modernistic fiction is confused at its best and trash at its worst. Such are the times when he runs to his collection to retrieve the much read ‘Collected Short Stories’ by Maugham and starts reading it for the umpteenth time. It is like a whiff of fresh air in this stifling atmosphere.

Words have a power of their own. There are many writers who are overwhelmed by this vigour but there are few who are not slaves but masters of words. They use them sparingly but precisely to convey their thoughts. This is what one admires most about Maugham’s work. His words seem to open a window to his mind through which you can clearly gaze at the story he is relating. Only qualities which Maugham advised aspiring writers to cultivate in their writings were lucidity, simplicity and euphony. Simple and lucid are most of his tales. Unlike many authors, he is not a juggler of words. One admires these writers for their mastery of language but can’t help finding oneself breathless at frequent intervals when reading their books. Maugham is a craftsman of tales and words are the raw material he uses to carve a grasping and compelling tale. There is no ornate imagery in his works such as will leave the reader spellbound, albeit, a wee bit confused.

There are 24 stories in this volume of collection. Most of them are based in his favourite country Southeast Asia and islands of South China Seas. In most author is a minor character narrating the tale. This technique of writing a story in first-person-singular has been mastered by Maugham. Technique lends an amazing degree of verisimilitude to the story. Author tells us only the details he knows and leaves to reader’s imagination what he doesn’t or couldn’t know. In the hands of a less skilled writer this could be recipe for a broken and disjointed narration but Maugham uses it to create an atmosphere of astounding reality. Most of the stories in this collection, as is usual in his works, relate to human emotions. These are tales of love and hate, passion and jealousy, of infidelity and unflinching faithfulness, of unfathomable sorrow and heart-breaking misery. Here is the detached and aloof master observing the frail mankind with all its follies. Master is non-judgmental. Sorrow doesn’t move him to despair neither does joy make him rapturous. He observes vice and virtue with the same dispassionate gaze. Maugham’s razor-sharp intellect, wry sardonic humour and keen understanding of human emotions are evident in each and every story. His genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time and place without being melodramatic simply takes your breath away.

In ‘Vessel of Wrath’ he tells the strange tale of love between an incurably self-righteous and devout missionary and a drunken, irreverent reprobate. ‘The Force of Circumstance’ narrates the poignant story of a British worker in Malaya whose newlywed English wife discovers his premarital relations with a native woman. ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’ is a melancholic, heartrending, story of an old woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a cruel rubber planter. ‘The Alien Corn’ is a story of an honest boy of snobbish parents who want a career for their son which conforms to their perceived status in the society, while the boy is hell bent on pursuing his passion for piano. In ‘Virtue’ Maugham tells the tale of a middle-aged woman who leaves her devoted husband of sixteen years in pursuit of a boy with whom she has had a short fling. ‘The Colonel’s lady’, a masterpiece of a short story, unsurpassable in its incredibly competent structure and beauty, is a sad funny tale of a pompous and conceited retired Colonel and his rather plain, docile wife leading a staid, uneventful, provincial life in a London suburb. All is as it should be, until the day Colonel discovers, to his utter surprise and incomprehension, that his wife has a talent for writing and has in fact published a highly acclaimed book of poetry themed on unabashed sexual desire and love.

When you have partaken of the best your mind stubbornly refuses the mediocre. But alas! There are not many authors with Maugham’s clarity of thought, sharpness of wit, and unpretentious story telling style. Cyril Connolly while acknowledging that it was difficult to predict the effect that Maugham’s work would have on the posterity, penned these memorable words, after his death:

“But, if all else perish, there will remain a story-teller’s world from Singapore to the Marquesas that is exclusively and forever Maugham, a world of verandah and prahu which we enter, as we do that of Conan Doyle’s Baker Street, with a sense of happy and eternal homecoming.”