LONGEVITY IS rarely desired by artists, who are fearful of outliving their talent as well as their fame. Whether he desired it or not, Somerset Maugham achieved a productive old age, and his laying down of the pen seemed an act consonant with a sense of the proprieties: his achievement was large; it was time for the dignity of silence. There was certainly no sign of the diminution of strength or elegance in his latest writings: his Muse stayed with him until it was time for his superannuation. Posterity may say that a literary gift which is not of the greatest will last longer than a genius, which is all for explosions that waste the creative tissue, and that Somerset Maugham’s lack of genius is best attested by a vast output whose quality showed little variation. Genius or not, Maugham had, up to the very end, the satisfaction of knowing that he was read, and read widely. It is likely that he will go on being read, and that his novels and stories – turned into films and television plays – will increasingly find audiences that have little time for books.
It is Maugham’s popularity that tends to upset the highbrow critics (there is no place for him in such surveys of fiction as Walter Allen’s Tradition and Dream), and students of literary style find magazine banality in his prose. In fact, Maugham’s seeming artlessness was a very considerable art, starting as a reaction against Victorian opulence, refined – in the time of his maturity – till it became a supple and economical instrument closer to Maupassant than to Henry James. Maugham knew perfectly well what he was doing: Cakes and Ale is a textbook of literary criticism as well as a superb novel.
Perhaps I ought to modify that judgment and say ‘a superb work of fiction’, for Cakes and Ale reads like an inflated (but deliciously inflated) short story. The short story was Maugham’s true métier, and some of the stories he wrote are among the best in the language. The form fitted a talent that was wide rather than deep, not (as with James) going over the same ground again and again till its possibilities were exhausted, but best nourished by travel, brief encounters with many human types, an anecdote swiftly jotted down between rubbers of bridge, a newspaper report, ‘brunch’ with a planter in Burma, a whisky suku in a Malayan club. The width of observation was something new in England fiction, as was the willingness to explore moral regions then regarded as taboo (as in Rain). The honesty of the reporter’s eye rejected the total disguise of fictional re-creation and sometimes courted (as in The Painted Veil and some of the Malayan stories) the risk of wounding innocent people, which often meant the danger of libel. This was the penalty of being true to life.
Perhaps one of Maugham’s finest creations was the first-person narrator who is almost, but not quite, the author himself. Here again was something that English fiction needed – the dispassionate commentator, the raisonneur, the man at home in Paris and Vienna but also in Seoul and Djakarta, convivial and clubbable, as ready for a game of poker as for a discussion on the Racine alexandrine, the antithesis of the slippered bookman. The chaperonage of this man-of-the-world was, and still is, a comfort to ordinary people who want to read but are frightened off by the image of the man-of-letters.
His plays – perhaps with the exception of his last, Sheppey – have not worn well but his books – though they, like the plays, deal with the surface of an age that is gone – are surprisingly undated. Liza of Lambeth still has power to shock, and Of Human Bondage, despite its inordinate length and its untypically clumsy prose, remains a viable, almost clinical, study of sexual obsessions. (A medical apprenticeship served Maugham better than it served Cronin.) The abiding flavour of his work is sharp and astringent. ‘It tastes of tart apples. It sets your teeth on edge, but it has a subtle, bitter-sweet savour that is very agreeable to the palate’. Maugham is there describing Driffield’s The Cup of Life in Cakes and Ale, but he might well have been describing his own stories, or at least the best of them. The best of them are going to live for a very long time.
Listener, 23 December 1965. The original piece is untitled.