Writer: W. Somerset Maugham

I do not pretend to being fashionable. I am too old, too short on time, too far out in the weeds, for  having any business with fashion. I read W. Somerset Maugham when I was young and I read him when I got older and I read him in prison. He shows up in the oddest places - in a novel by Mario Vargo Llosa, comes to mind - and never quite goes away. 

Nasrullah Mambrol's Analysis of W. Somerset Maugham’s Stories surprised me with its respectful analysis of Maugham's talents and qualities. He may have hit upon why Maugham never really goes away, regardless of fashion:

Illustrating the unaccountability of human behavior (for how could he endeavor to account for it?), “Maugham” remains a detached observer of life. Critics have wished for more poetry, loftier flights of imagination, more sympathy for his characters, and even occasional indirection; the lack of these things constitutes the limitation of Maugham’s style. Rejecting both the atmospheric romanticism of his predecessors and the exhaustive modernism of his contemporaries, Maugham’s short stories do not seek to penetrate either landscape or life. His reader, like his narrator, may experience admiration, annoyance, disgust, or pity for the characters, but he does not share or become immersed in their emotions. This point of view of a calm, ordinary man, so unusual for the twentieth century, is instructive, teaching careful and clear consideration of life’s possibilities, its casualties and successes, banalities, and gifts. In this way, objective understanding is increased by reading Maugham much as intersubjective facilities are by reading James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, or the other moderns.

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 12/30/21