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Out of this debonair stance Maugham develops the most evocative portraits of people and places. Reading his work is like receiving the most engaging letter from an eloquent travelling friend, and he would have made a wonderful blogger. Instead his writing style is characterised by a careless elegance, emotional constraint, an admirable transparency and a sharp observer’s eye. Somerset Maugham is not a flashy writer not for him the verbal pyrotechnics of more critically acclaimed authors.
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In both instances, however, the motivating force of his writing, and the source of its brilliance, lies in his exquisite characterisation. His short stories and novellas are often gems of clever plotting whereas his novels seem at first glance to be more languid and digressive. Somerset Maugham won literary success initially as a playwright, but it is his novels and short stories for which he is now remembered. In his autobiography he declared that he stood ‘in the very first row of the second raters’, a judgement that is as reactionary and simplistic as those that lie at the heart of the misguided interactions between his characters. In the 1930s he was the highest paid author in the world, but as ever, popularity came at the cost of serious critical recognition.
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But it has also been Somerset Maugham’s lot in the intellectual pecking order to be seen as lightweight. In a previous post I called him the literary equivalent of prawn cocktail. Custom and tradition, duty and decadence, the Riviera and the Empire: these are the landmarks that dominate his fictional universe, and have led, in part, to his being somewhat neglected today. The works of Somerset Maugham belong to another world a world dominated by the aftermath and anticipation of two horrific wars, a world where having a title might still matter, a world where there were servants as a matter of course, a world where the rich were idle.