Yes, Maugham

By Dan Hagen

Sitting on our deck at that uniquely comfortable angle that only an Adirondack chair can offer. Sipping at the dark gold of an Old Brown Dog Ale. Looking out across the shameless green of spring in the slanting light of late afternoon. Glancing down, from time to time, to read a page or two of Somerset Maugham.

It’s a comfortable, drowsy way to end a day — so pleasant, in fact, that you make a mental note of it and file it away with those days you don’t want to lose.

I picked up this substantial two-volume hardcover set of Maugham’s complete short stories for next to nothing at one of those library book sales that must rank among life’s unalloyed pleasures.  

Graham Sutherland's 1949 portrait of Maugham

The volumes are matched gray Doubleday editions with gold-stamped lettering on the covers, and feel just right in the hand. Bibliophiles will know what I mean.

Some books underline the excellence of their intellectual content with a matching aesthetic presence, a certain physical solidity, texture and balance. Good books are like friends, but books such as these are almost like lovers.

Maugham is one of those writers who seems to have fallen through the cracks of time — not cheap and splashy enough to have acquired a devoted cult to preserve him, like an Edgar Rice Burroughs, but not fancy enough to earn accolades from the forces of literature, like a William Burroughs.

Maugham, an English writer of the leisure class in the early 20^th century, was a smart enough observer of fashion and human nature to have guessed correctly at his own posthumous fate. You can hear that awareness as a defensive note in his prefaces. A proud craftsman, Maugham seems to sense that he’ll be dismissed as a magazine writer who was too fond of a decent plot and a more-than-decent income, and not fond enough of his art.

His contemporary Noel Coward was also aware that he would suffer the same slings and arrows. Both were already out of fashion even in my youth. Both waved away such criticisms as the products of envy and arrogance, but both visibly flinched at them anyway.

When someone suggests you’re really a fraud, you tend to entertain the thought, at least for a moment, presuming you’re not a perfectly self-satisfied sociopath.

Ian Fleming, a friend of both Maugham and Coward, paid Maugham the compliment of a pastiche in his short story Quantum of Solace, with James Bond substituting for Maugham’s much more realistic British agent character, Ashenden. Maugham had been an intelligence agent in World War I, so Ashenden was Maugham himself.

But it was spying on human nature, not on state secrets, that interested Maugham — particularly the ironies of human nature (for example, the revelation that great, insightful artists can also be creeps).

Maugham's Moorish charm

Maugham was gay and, like Coward, made no issue of the fact while doing little to conceal it. That then-scandalous truth alone charged his privileged, globe-trotting social life with irony, and put him outside society while still in its center — the ideal position for an observer.

From the vantage point of a social sniper, Maugham targets types you immediately recognize as genuine, but were perhaps never consciously aware of until now.

“I thought him a rather odious young man, but I did not mind that,” Maugham reflects in The Voice of the Turtle. “It is very natural that clever young men should be rather odious. They are conscious of gifts that they do not know how to use. They are exasperated with the world that will not recognize their merit. They have something to give, and no hand is stretched out to receive it. They are impatient for the fame they regard as their due. No, I do not mind odious young men; it is when they are charming that I button up the pockets of my sympathy.”

Though cosmopolitan, Maugham was firmly fixed in his era and class. But nevertheless, he tried to look outside them from time to time, thus setting himself the task of a real artist.

In the novel The Moon and Sixpence, Maugham gives us a painter who coldly abandons his wife and children to live in Tahiti. And in the novel The Razor’s Edge, Maugham describes a young veteran from Chicago whose combat experiences in World War I have exposed for him the emptiness of American materialism. Seeking more through meditation in India, he returns home with something special to offer.

Maugham’s short stories can often double back on you in interesting ways, and, like James Thurber’s, are particularly entertaining if read aloud .

After Ashenden has helped arrange the capture and execution of a gross and vulgar German secret agent in The Traitor, we hear the German spy’s little bull terrier howling in agonized mourning. Instantly international intrigue is dwarfed by the tragedy of ordinary human reality, and it’s haunting, not a story you forget.

I enjoy the fact that Maugham himself is almost always a character in his stories, circling the action like a particularly sagacious ghost. His first-person narration gives us a well-established viewpoint and thus a kind of traveling companion for our journeys through the byways and sharp, sudden turns of human drama.

That first-person narrative was so much a part of Maugham’s style that it even carried over into the movies made from his books, where it was an unnecessary if charming affectation. The actor Herbert Marshall, as dryly sophisticated as museum parchment, essentially played Maugham more than once, in The Moon and Sixpence (1942) and The Razor’s Edge (1946).

When his short story collections were brought to the screen, Maugham himself introduced them, and his sagging, world-weary features became familiar to audiences around the world he had traveled.

The first-person observer who pays close attention to those around him, sometimes peripheral to the action, sometimes central to it. Semi-detached, like one of those houses in London. As confident as a cat, though occasionally fatuous, and sometimes even eloquent in his pronouncements.

I wonder why that appeals to me?