Customer Reviews

Christmas Holiday (W. Somerset Maugham Works)

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This may not be Maugham's greatest work, but it is effective and well told. Charley, a young, benevolent, middle-class Englishman goes on holiday to Paris at Christmas-time. There, with a sardonic childhood friend, he undergoes a rite of passage common to youths of earlier eras: a visit to a brothel, here an expensive one (the Sèrail) where he meets Lydia, a Russian prostitute who works there ostensibly to help her convict husband, but, she confesses to him, where she is actually expiating the sin of murder committed by her husband through selling her body to despised and despising men. She has had a difficult life: impoverished childhood, early marriage to a charming youth who hides his criminal activities from her until committing a murder for which he is sentenced to Cayenne. Lydia, aware of his malevolent side, nonetheless has always loved and always will love this man and here Maugham convincingly portrays the irrationality, pain, and depth of love. After spending several days dining, dancing, visiting the Louvre, sharing a bedroom but never bed, Charley and Lydia part, he to his comfortable home and job in England, she back to the Sèrail. Yet after returning to familiar surroundings he notices that all is not as it was: he has been changed by this "holiday" and, as he reflects, the bottom has dropped out of his world.
Maugham was deprecated, perhaps due to jealousy of his success, by some literati of his day. Yet he did have a good control of language, solid descriptive skills, and a definite talent for narrative, all evident in "Christmas Holiday", making it a book that rings true and remains with one afterward.

Although this may not be the masterpiece of 20th literature, I have to admit that it was a very absorbing read. As we follow Charly, the well-bred perfect English gentlemen, through his week long vacation in Paris, we become ensnared in the life story of the prostitute he befriends and her web of friends and acquaintances. The story itself is interesting in its own right, but what really makes the narrative flow is how Maugham lets us peer into the psyches of various characters, all from different social strata. My personal favorite was Berger, Lydia's husband who despite his rogue behavior was one of the more memorable (and even likable) characters. Simon, Charly's friend was drawn perhaps a bit too extremely, but Maugham does use that to some effect. In any case, a fun read and a good story.

Maughm has the unusual talent of baring truths about human nature in a most simplified fashion. His insights into the complexities of human relationships reveal his incredible talent with words. Maughm has been my absolute favorite writer for years...His unpretentious writing style reveals intelligence in the most positive way, extending out to anyone who loves to hear a wonderful story.
"Christmas Holiday" begins and ends in one exhilirating whirlwind, without ever a moment of slight boredom. Maughm writes with a fluidity that cannot be matched by any other writer. He is simply the best at his art - storytelling.

I've read most of Somerset Maugham's major novels, and many of his short stories. He is one of my favorite English authors, mostly because of the skill with which he so easily marries place, time, and scenery into the drama at hand. The motivations and actions of his characters are generally believable and in tune with their characterization. Christmas Holiday is no exception, although in my book it's far behind his three best novels, "Of Human Bondage", "The Razor's Edge", and "The Moon and Sixpence". I like the story, but after two readings continue to find it less memorable than the novels just mentioned, or many of his South Pacific short stories.

Charley Mason, a middle class college student from England is given a holiday in Paris by his Babbit-esque father during Christmas-time. He gladly accepts, and there, looks up his philosophically engrossed friend, Simon. Simon has been living a spartan lifestyle, filling his head with fascist political idealogy. No matter how friendly Charley tries to be, Simon pushes him away in a misguided attempt to make himself "hard" and impervious. The interactions between Simon and Charley remind me of those between Anthony Beavis, Helen Amberley, and Mark Staithes in Aldous Huxley's, "Eyeless in Gaza". Both novels, which were written in the late 1930's, portray the tense build-up to WWII, and the brewing hostility of zealous fascists. Maugham certainly came across people seduced by fascist ideaology at this time, and Simon is the fictional incarnation of these uncompromising dogmatists.

The bulk of the story evolves around Charley's lengthy discussions with a young Russian prostitute named Lydia, introduced to him by Simon. Lydia is really the main focus of the novel, and it's her wild, and dramatic life-story which captivates and eventually opens Charley's naive and sleepy eyes to the complexities of the world, and especially women. Instead of using her for pleasure, as Simon had intended, Charley be-friends her (in accord with his gentlemanly nature) and spends his vacation time getting to know her. The best parts about the novel to me are Maugham's descriptions of the Parisian background. Unlike Huxley, Maugham has a play-write's acute sensibility to atmosphere, and is very comfortable describing and utilizing scenery: Charley's comfortable English home, Simon's spartan studio, Charley's pleasant hotel room, the streets of Montparnasse, the smoky cafes, bars, and restaurants, the Louvre, St. Eustache, French Guyanna, etc. are all vividly drawn. Each significant conversation between the characters takes place in a location which enhances and compliments the larger story. At the Louvre when Lydia shows Charley her favorite painting, a simple picture of bread and wine by Chardin, and tells him what it means to her, Charley, who had been reminiscing and searching for all the "significant" paintings his art-snob mother had so eloquently spoken to him of, is visably affected.

The contrast between Charley and all that he represents, with Lydia and her tragic world, is the heart of the novel. The main drawbacks to me are Robert Berger's (Lydia's imprisoned husband)overly-consuming story, and the seemingly sleight handling of Charley throughout. The Robert Berger mystery is interesting in itself, but sometimes didn't jibe well with the "Charley Mason explores and comes of age in Paris" storyline. And Maugham sometimes seems ambiguous about likable characters like Charley (or, Larry in "The Razor's Edge"). I think this reflects Maugham's increasing bitterness in old age, ala Lord Henry Wotton ("Dorian Gray"). As always with Maugham, there has to be drama, and I think Maugham's self-described status as "the best of the second-raters" is never more apropos than in Christmas Holiday.

Christmas Holiday is probably Somerset Maugham's forth most important novel after "Of Human Bondage","The Moon and Sixpense" and "The Razors Edge." At the time of its publication, "Cakes and Ale" was considered to be his most well written book, but it has not withstood the test of time. It is also about writers, and writers writing about writers is lazy self-centered writing. Holiday in the European language is also a vacation, and this is a story of a young man on a five day trip to Paris. Instead of exclusively Maxim's, The Moulon Rouge, and sight seeing he falls inside the seamy side of life. The story takes us from Paris to French Guinea and Devil's Island prison colony. The young man returns to London a changed man, but not the way his parents intended. On another level Maugham was making a statement on the self complacency of the British and their reluctance to fight Fascism {i.e. Jack London's "The Iron Heal"} in 1937, about the time Maugham started the book. The book was recieved with bad reviews from Graham Greene and glowing reviews from many others, including Glenway Wescott who included it in a Somerset Maugham anthology he put together in book form. This is not to be confused with great literature but it is a good story and very readable, like all of Maugham. It is also for anyone interested in Paris before the War. I have recommended it to three of my well-read friends and they all thanked me for it.

"Christmas Holiday" takes place in a period of interlude between the two world wars in England and France when the worst in world affairs was not over but yet to come. For Charley Mason, the young Englishman the gift of 5 days in Paris his parents have given him turns out to be less the anticipated celebration and more of an unsettling interlude in his own life. It develops for him into a revelatory journey that blemishes his happy heart and privileged home life. He reunites in Paris with a troubled boyhood friend Simon now a news reporter who he hasn't seen for two years. Charley is bewildered and tries to gain perspective on Simon's seeming metamorphosis into a self-confessed misanthropist and insensitive manipulator. It is Simon who lays out all the sores of humanity for Charley's tender sensibilities to collide with. At the Sérail, a cabaret where bare breasted dancing girls glitter in harem pants and turbans and can be taken upstairs for a price, Simon pairs Charley with "Princess Olga" the working name of an enigmatic Russian girl named Lydia. Charley is ensnared by Lydia's anguished life story, her orphaned state, her poverty and unreasonable devotion to a convict husband whose imprisonment and guilt she feels she must share through her own continued suffering. For a brief time the reality of Charley 's respectable, comfortable and secure existence becomes entwined with those whom fate has not so similarly blessed. His"Holiday" changes him forever.

Here again Maugham's gift for telling a story is evident. He uses words with a facility that brings a narrative to life in a way that engages the imagination and enables the reader to vividly picture the characters and events. A recommended read.

Charley Mason is off to spend his Christmas week in Paris and the young respectable middle-class life he knows is suddenly thrown into sharp relief as he comes into contact with a world-weary russian prostitute who's life story becomes the real center of this novel.
Lydia works in a brothel and when Charlie's ascetic living friend Simon takes him there to show him a good time, Charlie befriends her instead and is drawn temporarily into her world.
Maugham draws on his intimate knowledge of both cultures to draw vivid characters and in describing varied settings from the Louvre to the backstreet cafes and brothels of pre-war Paris. The tale related to Charlie by his new acquaintance is the heart of the story and quite a story it turns out to be.
I recently read that this was not considered by Maugham to be one of his better novels but it is still highly entertaining, enlightening and a fine read.

It will be a sad day for me when I run out of Somerset Maugham novels to read. Christmas Holiday is not one of his best-known books, but it is on par with the best.

At the heart of the novel is a plot-driver frequently taken up by Maugham: the protagonist falls in love with someone who does not by any measure deserve him or her. Indeed, in one of the characters' own words here: '...I can't imagine anything more heart-rending than to love with all your soul someone that you know is worthless' (page 239). Such is also the premise of The Painted Veil, Theatre, The Magician, and of course of the masterpiece, Of Human Bondage. But it is given a new twist here in that the story is told from the perspective of a third party, a young Englishman on a visit to Paris.

Thus the book begins with Charley Mason's decision to spend a few days in the French capital over Christmas, on a visit to a childhood friend with a foreign correspondent's posting. But the mischievous Simon has planned something else for Charley than a romp about town. Charley Mason is soon drawn to the sad tale of Lydia, Russian exile, wife of a convicted murderer, and now prostitute in a classy brothel. The focus shifts to Lydia's luckless life. Smart, sensitive, she is our sufferer of hopeless love: for the worthless Robert Berger, the small-time crook who once married her, turned killer, and is now imprisoned in Guyana. Mason is confronted with lives wasted in solitude, danger, destitution. Maugham lets us peer at the 1930s Paris underworld and the abject condition of its shipwrecked Russians. But the novel's strength draws from the contrast with Mason's own respectable and moneyed, English background. Thus Mason takes Lydia to the Louvre, only to see her play havoc with the preconceptions cherished by his family of amateur artistic patrons. And his Christmas Holiday becomes the prompt for a re-evaluation of Mason's charmed but futile-looking existence back in London.

This is a rich and vividly written novel, though gloomy and perhaps not best read over a Christmas holiday itself. One of the worthiest Maughams.

It has been said that the Nobel Prize Committee for Literature is adverse to mass-market success, which may explain in part why W. Somerset Maugham never received its honor. During the 1930s, a period of economic collapse and social turmoil, Maugham was the world's highest-paid author and lived a comfortable life at his house on the French Riviera. The Englishman was a household name amongst readers and is widely known today, but his success during a bleak period caused resentment in the literary set.

A second disadvantage, perhaps even more glaring, was Maugham's use of an obsolete writing style. Though considered a modernist, his fiction is cast in a simplified Victorian language that at times seems out of place with the subject matter. Even through the 1940s, Maugham's approach went practically unchanged while a younger generation of writers broke new ground. When Maugham, for instance, published his incomparable 'The Razor's Edge' in 1944, George Orwell had just completed 'Animal Farm' and Samuel Beckett had published his short story cycle 'More Pricks Than Kicks' ten years before.

'Christmas Holiday,' first published in 1939, is a later Maugham novel that receives no favors from his archaic, straightlaced prose. Though effective at times, his storytelling doesn't fit the era it is depicting and reads like a 1930s social commentary through the eyes of Anthony Trollope. Published just before the outbreak of World War II, it is an unbalanced, often neurotic tale in which Maugham seems to be fighting against developments that endangered western tradition. It is difficult for an author of Maugham's talent to write a 'bad' novel, but he was extremely close with 'Christmas Holiday' to achieving the feat.

Set in 1930s Paris, 'Christmas Holiday' is divided into ten lengthy chapters. The focal character is Charley Mason, a 23-year-old Cambridge graduate and descendant of a property-owning family who is vacationing alone on Christmas week. Most of his dealings are with Simon Fenimore, a boyhood friend now working as a journalist, and Lydia, a Russian prostitute to whom Simon introduces him. As a sensitive, artistic young man who acts out of pity for her sordid lifestyle, Charley travels through the city and shares a depressing hotel room with Lydia for nearly his entire visit.

Charley's trip becomes something of an underground odyssey. Lydia is the wife of Robert Berger, a thief who was sent to French Guiana for murdering a horse racing bookie. We learn through her recollections and those of Simon, who covered Berger's trial, about a love affair with tragic results. These accounts, told in flashback style, carry a high amount of suspense and are made quite interesting by the fact that Simon, a devoted nihilist, was amused by Berger's personality. Charley also encounters the Russian refugee community and two survivors of Guiana who further build up his perspective on life.

Maugham, who was 65 at the time of Christmas Holiday's publication, seems to be rehashing a great deal of his earlier novels. Charley's initial dilemma of becoming an artist and earning decent income is akin to Charles Strickland in 'The Moon and Sixpence,' while his dealings with Lydia and her sexual ambivalence mirror Philip Carey with Mildred Rogers in 'Of Human Bondage.' The deceit and violence of Robert Berger can also be found in several of Maugham's writings, especially his short story 'The Letter.' For those acquainted with his fiction, Maugham seems to be walking old territory and desperate to understand the social landscape where tradition and values were falling apart.

Aside from subject matter, 'Christmas Holiday' is sloppy in execution and in need of a rewrite. Maugham's characters sometimes break from their personality for no reason at all (Lydia suddenly jumps into a well-turned argument on politics) and the use of flashback and story-within-story cuts into the novel's pace as a whole. The book seems to lag and never really catches fire the way it should. 'Christmas Holiday' manages to be engaging, but it ranks far below classics like 'Razor,' 'Of Human Bondage,' and 'The Painted Veil.' I would only recommend it to Maugham completists and those with an appreciation of Paris during the Great Depression.

Maugham's novels are available in softcover from Vintage Classics, while I have on my bookshelf (but not for long) a hardback copy of its 1939 printing from P. F. Collier & Son. Released in 2000, the Vintage edition appears to reuse Collier's original type, which is large and clear. All of Maugham's fiction, however, is worth reading.

The ease and the smoothness of Somerset Maugham's style make reading this book enjoyable. However the story itself is just OK, nothing extraordinary. However keeping in mind that it's a preWWII novel, there are some intelligent political remarks and astute psychological analysis of the charachters