August 1961
Mr. Maugham is said to have described his writing as ‘a harmless habit that happens to be profitable’; he has also said that he knows just where he stands: ‘in the very front row of the second-raters’. These two remarks taken together do seem to sum up much of his attitude towards his writing, although whether his attitude and his private feeling about it are the same thing is difficult to determine. The ‘harmless habit’ has a faint echo of the epigrammatic decorations which embroider his earlier plays, and his assessment of his writing has that ruthlessly unsentimental accuracy which people only believe when somebody applies it to himself. His writing has certainly been profitable - forty-two million copies of his works have been sold to date (this does not, of course, take into account the various and innumerable dramatic presentations of his plays and stories); he must in fact have provided more people with entertainment than any other living writer. A book about him which he does not object to is therefore of much general interest.
Mr. Cordell gives us a brief biographical sketch, which is necessary although it does not tell one anything new, and then goes on to discuss Maugham’s works - beginning with what he calls the autobiographical novels and going on to most of the others (there are twenty in all), and followed by the short stories and the plays (twenty-seven original and three adaptations). There is a brief chapter about the non-fiction, and finally, and most interesting, a summary of critics’ view on Maugham throughout his long career. He has been condemned by the highbrow for failing to create any new form, an accusation which could be levelled at many writers of classic significance. He has been condemned by the lowbrow for writing about people he met and/or knew - an ephemeral judgement, since it is usually transformed from contemporary wickedness into historical interest in half a lifetime. Perhaps a fair conclusion might be, that it you do something as well as Mr. Maugham, your own excellence - intelligence, observation, craftsmanship, accuracy, honesty - betrays to you those regions which are both disciplined by and mysteriously free of these merits. In any case, in spite of repetition, and some woolly and arbitrary reasoning, Mr. Cordell’s book reminds one of Maugham’s phenomenal contribution, which in turn makes one realise that a writer producing this intelligent and successful quantity of work actually raises the standard of popular writing: ‘the very front row of the second-raters’ becomes a more exclusive position than many a young writer likes to imagine.