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Tuesday, 26 March 2013

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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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