Revisiting Somerset Maugham
Most of the knowledgeable young people reading this column would have
read or even heard his name as a writer who wrote well both as a
creative writer and an appreciator of good writing in English. Can you
guess who he was among the great writers? He was W Somerset Maugham.
Before you and I were born he published the wisdom he gained of a
lifetime in his seminal work titled The Summing Up. It is worth reading
what he wrote particularly on literature and appreciation of it. It is
relevant even to date,
W Somerset Maugham |
First let us note some of his general references on life itself.
* The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing
unless it ennobles.
* In my twenties the critics said I was brutal, in my thirties they
said I was flippant, in my forties they said I was cynical, in my
fifties they said I was competent and in my sixties they say I am
superficial.
Now this book I am talking about is his auto biography. It has 77
chapters full of interest. Just as much as I enjoyed his near fiction
Cakes and Ale, his Summing Up was my favourite when I was a teenager.
You would like his precision in writing.Some of our writers who are in
the medical field write better English than the others as far as
precision is concerned. Like wise Maugham too was a medicine man.
Here are random elections from his writing for your pleasure and
wisdom. I quote the first paragraph in chapter 26;
“In my youth, when my instinctive feeling about a book differed from
that of authoritative critics I did not hesitate to conclude that I was
wrong. I did not know how often critics accept the conventional view and
it never occurred to me that they could talk with assurance of what they
did not know very much about. It was long before I realised that the
only thing that mattered to me in a work of art was I thought about it.
I have acquired now a certain confidence in my own judgment, for I
have noticed that that what I felt instinctively forty years ago about
the writers I read then, and what I would not heed because it did not
agree with current opinion, is now pretty generally accepted.
For all that I still read a great deal of criticism, for I think it a
very agreeable form of literary composition. One does not always want to
be reading to the profit of one’s soul and there is no pleasanter way of
idling away an hour or two than reading a volume of criticism. It is
diverting to agree; it is diverting to differ; and it is always
interesting to know what an intelligent man has to say about some
writer, Henry More, for instance, or Richardson, whom you have had
occasion to read.”
The above passage is self evident in the process of learning by
Somerset Maugham.
In Chapter 22 somewhere in the middle Maugham says: “It seems to me
that what makes genius is the combination of natural gifts for creation
with an idiosyncrasy that enables its possessor to see the world
personally is the highest degree and yet with such catholicity that his
appeal is not to this type of man or to that type, but to all men. His
private world is that of common men, but ampler and more pithy. His
communication is universal and though men may not be able to tell
exactly what it signifies they feel that it is important.”
Let me conclude with one more passage that you may consider
evaluating the writer’s contention. This comes somewhere in chapter 56.
“I do not know if I could ever have written stories in the Chekov
manner .I did not want to. I wanted to write stories that proceeded,
tightly knit, in an unbroken line from the exposition to the conclusion
.I saw the short story as a narrative of a single event, material or
spiritual, to which by the elimination of everything that was not
essential to its elucidation a dramatic unity could be given I had no
fear of what is technically known as “the point”.” I think that all of
us should revisit occasionally some great writing done in the past
century to understand better the current century’s writing.
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