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W. Somerset Maugham: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction)

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Stanley Archer

W. Somerset Maugham
A Study of the Short Fiction

Twayne, Hardback, 1993.
8vo. xii, 135 pp. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction No. 22

First published in 1993.

Contents

Preface

Part 1. The Short Fiction

Introduction
Orientations and Early Stories
The South Sea Stories
Ashenden; or, The British Agent and Six Stories Written in The First Person Singular
Cosmopolitans: The Short Shorts
The Mixture as Before and Creatures of Circumstance
Conclusion
Notes to Part 1

Part 2. The Writer

Introduction
Preface to East and West
Notes on the Short Story from Traveller's Library

Part 3. The Critics

Introduction
Graham Greene
H. E. Bates
Angus Wilson
Archie K. Loss

Chronology
Selected Bibliography
Index

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I am puzzled yet again: who's going to read such a book? Except curious Maugham buffs just to find out that it is not worth reading. To start with, it contains the plots of all short stories Maugham ever wrote, often narrated in tedious detail and containing absolutely nothing which is not perfectly obvious for anybody who can read - and think, perhaps. Now, if one is familiar with Maugham's stories, such plot descriptions are all but unreadable, and if one knows nothing of these works, the last thing one wants is their plots in advance (with some of best lines quoted at that) for they will spoil a great deal of the pleasure he might otherwise get from them. Moreover, it is much more important what a given work means for oneself than what the most eminent critics saw in it. Or not? After all, no one is his right mind reads a critical study of literary works he is not intimately familiar with. Or does one?

The best that can be said about Mr Archer's so called ''study'' is that it is quite comprehensive. He is correct in his assessment that Maugham wrote exactly 112 short stories: 91 from his collections and travel books collected in the definitive Heinemann edition (3 vols., 1951) and 21 published in book form only after Maugham's death in ''Seventeen Lost Stories'' (1969, edited by Craig Showalter, 17 stories of course) and ''Traveller in Romance'' (1984, edited by John Whitehead, 4 pieces). At first glance it does seem that Mr Archer has done his homework and really knows what he is writing about. Not quite though. For example, he mentions twice an early short story named A Sad Case which seems to have been invented by Mr Archer himself. I have never heard anything about such work by Maugham, neither published nor unpublished, neither in book form nor in periodicals. From the context I gather that Mr Archer probably means ''A Bad Example'', one of Maugham's earliest attempts in the genre which is discussed separately. The author's observation that four pieces - ''Mabel'', ''Masterson'', ''The Escape'' and ''The Princess and the Nightingale'' - were taken from Maugham's travel book ''The Gentleman in the Parlour'' (1930) and published like short stories is grossly inaccurate. First of all, The Escape is a short story first published in a magazine under the title The Widow's Might and later in the collection ''Cosmopolitans'' (1936); it has nothing to do with Maugham's travel books. Secondly, Mr Archer is not aware that the short stories ''A Marriage of Convenience'' and ''Mirage'' were taken from this very travel book as well. Finally, ''The Princess and the Nightingale'' was first published under this title in a magazine (1922), later it was issued as a pamphlet named ''Princess September and The Nightingale'' (1939) and it finally became just ''Princess September'' in The ''Complete Short Stories'' (1951). As far as ''The Gentleman in the Parlour'' as a source of short stories is concerned, Mr Archer got right only 3 of 5.

I suppose this little book may be somewhat useful if one just wants to check what the plot of a certain short story by Maugham was - if one has already read the piece in question of course. Indeed, if one's memory fails, one had better read the story again. Mr Archer's occassional attempts for analysis range from passable to pathetic, with a strong prevalence of the latter. He usually concentrates on mundane and hardly interesting matters like form and type of narrative, or simply states the main theme of a story thus greatly oversimplifying its content. His Introduction and his remarks in the beginning and in the end of each chapter have some slender value as a concise summary of Maugham's output in the short story genre but that hardly justifies a whole book. For instance, Mr Archer shows that he has considerable talent for discovering the obvious by observing that Maugham's first collection, Orientations (1899), immature as it is, shows a number of similarities in terms of settings, characters and themes with Maugham's later and far more accomplished short stories. Extremely perceptive, indeed!

Perhaps the gravest defect of Mr Archer's study is its limitation to the short stories. When I am saying, as I have numerous times, that Maugham's oeuvre must be viewed in toto I am not just talking through my hat. To take just two examples, Mr Archer tells us that in Red Maugham explores one of his favourite themes, namely that ''the tragedy of love is indifference''. Quite true of course, but he fails to point out that the same theme - and, astonishingly, in the same words, though the treatment of the subject is completely different - occurs in Maugham's masterpiece for the stage ''The Circle'', arguably his best play, which incidentally was published in the same year as ''Red'', 1921. Obviously Mr Archer has never read Maugham's plays. Nor, apparently, has he ever read his non-fiction writings, or at least he never read them with anything that might pass for serious attitude. Maugham's most famous short story, ''Rain'', is one of the places where Mr Archer, rather lamely, tries a literary analysis. He shamelessly wastes the reader's time with some obscure symbolism but doesn't say a single word about the story's origins and how it came to be written. Which is unforgivable in this case because Maugham himself wrote a good deal about that and it provides his admirers with a priceless insight into his craft. Everybody who has read Maugham's fascinating collection of notes ''A Writer's Notebook'' (1949) could not possibly have failed to notice that the physical descriptions of the fanatical Davidsons and the brash Sadie were transferred almost word for word from the notebooks into the short story, and so was the first part of the plot. But everything else came from Maugham's imagination and inventive power; he talked but once with the missionary couple and not at all with Sadie herself (though he dared used her real name, as Wilmon Menard proved a good many years ago). In the same collection of notes one can even find the note for a short story which Maugham made at the time; it is curious to learn that his most famous short piece of fiction was initially conceived as written in the first person singular and with pretty much the same lurid and now so well known ending. Mr Archer, alas, doesn't seem to be interested in such matters. (Incidentally, Maugham's own account of how ''Rain'' was written is given in his preface to East and West which is reprinted in this book - see below.)

Even within the genre of the short story, Mr Archer is tragically commonplace and superficial. He does know that there are four early short stories by Maugham - ''A Marriage of Convenience'', ''Cousin Amy'', ''The Happy Couple'' and ''The Mother'' - written before the First World War which, unlike all others from this period, the author thought sufficiently good to revise and publish later in his career. This is priceless opportunity to obtain invaluable insight into Maugham's spectacular development as a writer but Mr Archer is too busy with plot descriptions to pay attention to this. In all four cases the later versions are of course distinctly superior, but in only one of them (''The Mother'') was this achieved by minor revision. The other three stories were completely rewritten, changing locales or narrator's point of view, adding characters and dialogue, sometimes changing the title as well (''Cousin Amy'' became ''The Luncheon''). It is a well known fact that Somerset Maugham was a consumate craftsman. But very few people realise how true this statement really is. Comparing the early and the later versions of these four stories is a most revealing experience for everybody seriously interested in Somerset Maugham. I should have thought that such analyses of the literary content and the historical background, together with incisive and penetrating ones about the other stories (without any explicit references to the plots!) would have made the ideal critical companion to Maugham's short stories, though I doubt such thing is really necessary at all. Mr Archer's book certainly is not. Somerset Maugham, indeed, has always and in all of his writings been entirely self-sufficient.

The second part of the book reprints some of Maugham's own writings about the art of the short story. He wrote a great deal on the subject and his clear, lucid and witty style is embarrassingly superior to Mr Archer's dull, pretentious and impersonal one. So is the content in Maugham's pieces, notwithstanding the poor selection here which is just another strong evidence for Mr Archer's incapacity to handle his subejct, though his introductory notes do show that he knows pretty well what the great writer wrote on the subject. He should have devoted more than 20 pages to Maugham's own writings, to start with; the contrast with the perfectly useless first part of 70 pages is almost glaring. Instead the preface to Maugham's first volume of collected short stories (''East and West'', 1934, also published in England as ''Altogether'') and few notes from his first antology The Travellers' Library, fine as they are, Mr Archer should have chosen the compelling 27 pages introduction to ''Tellers of Tales'' (1939), subtitled 100 Short Stories From the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany, or Maugham's late essay The Short Story published in his last full lenght book Points of View (1958) and effectively summing up a lifetime as a short story writer. Most certainly, Mr Archer should have included in this section all prefaces, forewords and introductions, originally present in the first edition or written later, from the eight mature short story collections Maugham published during his lifetime. These are gems full of amusing wit and impressive erudition; moreover, they are long since out print and hard to find and their rerpinting in a more or less modern volume would have been invaluable; last but certaily not least, they offer tremendous amount of insights into Maugham's personality both as a man and as a writer. Needless to say, these excerpts from Maugham are by far the best part of the book. It is indeed a great relief to switch from Mr Archer to them.

The third part of the book is dedicated to the critics and what few of them said about Maugham's short stories. The sensible Maugham admirer needn't waste his time with that nonsense which regularly borders on crap. He may skip these 15 pages or so without any fear that he will miss anything of any consequence.