Maugham in My Readerly World

How does one get so besotted by a writer that overnight most other books in the genre turn insipid?

I was visiting my wife, who was then pursuing MD. We had been married recently. She could not take leave from work. In her absence the whole day, I found myself a little lost in the company of relatives I had acquired only a few months back. She must’ve felt guilty about my lonesomeness. One evening she brought me a couple of books from the city British Council Library. One of them was a collection of W. Somerset Maugham’s short stories.

I had not heard of Maugham then. I had read only a few classic authors in English. I picked up the book wearily. Book jolted me with the force of an electric current. I read it in a trance. I had not read any other book with such animated interest. Maugham, quite simply, had knocked my socks off. I had no idea what was in the book that so caught my fancy. I was only aware of the pure, unbridled pleasure his stories brought my way. I implored my wife to get me more of his books. 

 

William Somerset Maugham*

Maugham had a beautifully wrinkled face in his old age. A young artist once asked him if he could touch up some of the wrinkles in Maugham’s picture he had done. ‘Young man, it has taken me eighty years to acquire these. You want to erase them with a stroke of your brush!’ Maugham is supposed to have quipped. 

*I sketched this in pencil last year. Original was done by the artist Graham Sutherland, in 1953. Maugham was then seventy-nine. Sutherland drew many portraits of Maugham. Most are in National Portrait Gallery, London.

These events are more than three decades old. I have only a vague recollection of Maugham’s books I read in that long vacation. I think there was another short story collection and a novel or two. Maugham had turned the world of my fiction-reading topsy-turvy. Bottom had fallen out of this world. I could vaguely surmise that his story-telling was remarkably different from any I had encountered till then. I hungrily devoured each of his books, I could lay my hands on.

Those days books were not easy to obtain. They were expensive, especially the ones imported. As I eagerly hunted for Maugham’s books, I found that most libraries and book-shops, at least in the North-Indian cities I lived then, did not stock them. Today, life of a reader and a bibliophile is as easy as a pie. All the information they seek regarding a book or an author is literally at their fingertips. E-commerce has been a boon for the book-maniac. In a few minutes, they can order the cheapest copy of the book from any corner of the country or the world.

I stumbled on my next cache of Maugham’s books a year or two later in Poona, where I had gone for post-graduate training. The Army Command library had ten to fifteen of these. When I saw them stacked in a rack, I was dizzy with joy. I read them quickly and voraciously. They stoked hunger for more. I looked for them with renewed vigour. From a vendor of used books on the pavement of MG Road, I picked up Of Human Bondage. This is considered his masterpiece. In a book-fair in the city I found Razor’s Edge. My Maugham collection had begun. My sister, in a sudden rush of apathy for her large book-collection, sent me the complete bunch. Among these, I found three volumes of his short stories and a few novels.

I had by now read a fair portion of Maugham’s vast body of work. Today I do not intend to write about his books. I will hence not comment on the merits or demerits of any. Those that had impressed me most till now were his novels, The Moon and the SixPence, Cakes and Ale, Of Human Bondage and his short stories, The Book Bag, The Colonel’s Lady, Flotsam and Jetsam, The Fall of Edward Bernard, Rain, and innumerable others. These incredible tales stirred in my mind a unique world of thoughts and reverie. I could retreat to this refuge at will and extract unbounded joys. 

I could still not figure out the quality in Maugham’s writing that had so overwhelmingly captured my imagination. But smitten as I was by his prose, I believed that if I ever put pen to paper, in order to give vent to an irrepressible urge to share my thoughts, I must strive to write like him.

My colleagues who read books were aware of Maugham. But none had read him much. There was no one to suggest more of his books. I learnt that most considered Maugham a high-brow author. When they saw me with one of his books, they would roll-up their eyes and exclaim in mock bewilderment, ‘Oh, Maugham! He is too highfalutin for me.’ There was a hint of innuendo in their expression accusing me of being a snob. I was baffled by this common opinion. I had found his books plain like theorems of Euclidean geometry. Each sentence meant what it said and rarely did one need to read a passage again to get its import. I had not read any literary appraisal of Maugham then. My opinion of his books was stimulated solely by feelings they evoked; It was uninformed.

And then the world-wide-web entered my life. Information, just a click away, poured incessantly like English rain. My Maugham-world swelled rapidly. I discovered many of his books that I had not read. I came across his nonfiction works: travel books, anthology of essays, and the autobiographical, Summing-up and A Writer’s Notebook. This new knowledge reinvigorated my search for his books which had lain dormant for some time. Over the next couple of years, I acquired his complete oeuvre. I also learned about his biographies and obtained most. 

In his nonfiction books, which I found as ravishing, I read his views on his craft. When I read about the qualities, he considered indispensable in good prose, the penny dropped. Instantly I recognised the uniqueness of his style that I had all along found strikingly different from most writers, but had been unable to fathom. Maugham advised every writer to cultivate three virtues in writing: Simplicity, meaning free from ostentation or display; lucidity, meaning clarity of thought or style; and euphony, implying acoustic effect produced by words so formed or combined as to please the ear. This was the essence of the lure his writing held for me. This was the only prose style that I thought was worth emulating- a fool that I was and am, to think it could be imitated. 

Simplicity and lucidity of Maugham’s prose cannot be missed. His phrases, choice of words, and syntax, most clearly and unambiguously convey his thoughts. Minds of the author and the reader seem to communicate without any hindrance. Euphony, the harmony of words as they ring in the reader's mind, I think, is the most difficult quality to appreciate. But it’s essential in a lustrous prose. Its absence is easier to note as this makes any piece of writing sound inelegant. Other essential attributes of Maugham’s prose are brevity and compactness of narration. There is not a word extra in his stories, nor a passage in his novels that does not bear some import for the facts being narrated. Throughout the length of his story, be it a short story of fifteen thousand words or a novel that is three hundred pages thick, he never loses sight of story's theme. This extraordinary prowess in continually anchoring reader's attention to the story being narrated, imbues his books with an ineffable charm that simply takes your breath away.

I realise my meditation on Maugham’s prose is leading me away from the alleged purpose of this piece. I had not set out to talk about Maugham and his writing, only about my consuming passion for him. But a few words about his art are essential to lay bare the appeal he held for me. As I read his biographies, I learnt another facet of his writing. Facts and fiction are inextricably mixed in his stories. This and his incomparably skilful use of first-person singular in narrating a tale, where the author himself is a minor character in the story, lend a stunning verisimilitude to his stories. Themes I encountered in his stories were astonishingly new to me. His dispassionate narration of human suffering, his ability to bring out the despicable in the lives of his characters and situate it with their nobility, all in a tolerant, non-judgemental voice, were the novelties I had not found in literature earlier. 

I was in Agra for a conference. At Modern Book Depot in Sadar Bazar, I chanced upon W. Somerset Maugham- The Critical Heritage, a vast collection of critiques, his books had invited at the time of their publication. The hardbound edition was being sold dirt cheap. Its pages had yellowed. I grabbed it instantly. By now, I had read almost complete books of Maugham. As I read these reviews, criticisms, and words of praise, some by renowned figures of the literary world of that era like, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Katherine Mansfield, Christopher Isherwood, etc., I remembered the books that had given me much joy. I also learnt what these professional writers and critics had to say about the author I had adored all these years.

My Maugham world now looked well endowed. My appreciation of his craft was unbounded. I realised this increasingly, as I now developed distaste for any work of fiction which did not relate facts briefly and plainly. I fell unabashedly for a writing that was lucid, trenchant and concise. I found much of it in fiction and in the nonfiction world. Prose style of the author became a major source of joy as I read a book which possessed these attributes. 

Unintentionally, but perhaps excessively, I quoted Maugham whenever I found myself discussing books. This fact was revealed by the shocking remarks - jeering and often annoyed - at home and in company of friends: Oh, you and your Maugham!; Don’t speak to me in your Maugham lingo; You can’t derive laws of living from Maugham’s books. My daughter, when she was still in school, declared in a heated argument, ‘I’ll never read a book of Maugham in my life’, apparently because I was so fond of him.

All this was more than a decade ago. In these years I have read many more books than I read in the previous two decades. I read diverse genres too. I came across scintillating prose, both in fiction and nonfiction. I came to know many varieties of writing. I found that, although lacking in simplicity, many of these were resplendent with beauty. I read fiction that was highly nuanced and replete with lucidity too. I read novels with esoteric language, yet with a gripping narrative. I found stories with an enviable succinctness, brevity and profound commentary on vicissitudes of human condition. Unconsciously, I revised my appraisal of Maugham’s works. I recognised the restricted spread of human nature in his stories, politically sterile milieu of his tales (as if wars, revolution, mutiny, colonialism, racism, class struggle happened in some other world), preponderance of a few themes in most of his plots, and the rather narrow scope of his imagination. 

My frenzied ardour of early years is now a constant, placid praise for the art of a master story-teller, whose books once revealed to me the sublime beauty of simple language and the wonderful joys of a story told plainly. He is an inseparable part of my journey in the realm of written word. I often pickup his books in an attempt to relive the spell they cast on me when I read them first. They never fail to gratify my longings. Whenever I find I am being led astray from the clear, lucid prose in my readings, I pick up a Maugham story, to regain my moorings.

There are days, languid and dreary, when urge to read a story told competently, a plain tale read just for the pleasure of its narration, a story with, ‘a beginning, a middle, and an end,’ as all stories must have, becomes irresistible. I then turn to Maugham, as would an addict to the fix of his drugs.