[BITList] Fwd: W. Somerset Maugham - Writer who roamed the globe

[Ronald Thomas]

John  To me very interesting as Somerset Maughn was a fellow refugee on "Dunera" in June 1940, Convoy HGZ from Gib to Liverpool. He allegedly, wrote sometime later, a book which mentioned my younger sister and I possibly in the dedication. Cannot remember the name but my father had an autographed copy. I looked for it when he died but was unable to find it although I do remember seeing it when younger. Not the only thing that we lost during "la Guerre".    Ron
  egin forwarded message:


  From: "Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar" <bosham at gmail.com>

  Date: 6 December 2009 12:11:22 AM AEST

  To: "avinash Sahasrabudhe" <avinash.sahasrabudhe at gmail.com>

  Subject: W. Somerset Maugham - Writer who roamed the globe



  Monday, December 7, 2009

  BOOK REVIEW: Writer who roamed the globe

  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/07/writer-who-roamed-the-globe/

  By Martin Rubin

  THE SKEPTICAL ROMANCER: SELECTED TRAVEL WRITINGS

  Edited by Pico Iyer

  Everyman's Library, $24, 196 pages

  Reviewed by Martin Rubin

  It is difficult to think of a writer more quintessentially British in his persona and oeuvre
  than W. Somerset Maugham, yet he was in fact one of the most cosmopolitan English
  writers. Born in France, he spoke French before English, also knew German, Spanish,
  Italian and Russian, and was from the age of 16 an inveterate traveler.

  He spent much of the next 75 years roaming the globe and for the last four decades
  of life made his home on the French Riviera, except for a wartime sojourn in the United
  States in the 1940s.

  Maugham traveled for the sheer pleasure of it, always in search of all 
  manner of adventure, always interested in and attuned to what he was 
  encountering. And being a writer, he was assiduous in writing down his 
  experiences. Still, as Pico Iyer (no slouch himself as a travel writer) 
  points out in his insightful introduction to this slim volume of Maugham's 
  "selected travel writings," he only wrote four actual books in this 
  particular genre out of an enormous output:

  "In practice, only four out of the seventy-eight books Maugham turned out 
  are generally placed on the shelves marked 'Travel': his classic account of 
  a journey from Rangoon to Haiphong, 'The Gentleman in the Parlour,' brought 
  out in 1930; a series of sketches and snapshots called 'On a Chinese Screen,'
  from 1922; a very early, boyish series of wanderings around southern Spain,
  'The Land of the Blessed Virgin,' published in 1905, that he delighted in mocking
  and repudiating in later works for its flowery style and juvenile effusions; and
  a meditation on some figures in Spanish history - explicitly not 'a book of travel,'
  though often categorized as such, 'Don Fernando,' in 1935."

  Mr. Iyer has excerpted wisely and adequately from these first three books of 
  Maugham's, but because, as he rightly says "travel lay behind much of his 
  work," the editor has performed the more difficult but infinitely worthwhile 
  task of mining what he terms the writer's "masterly appraisal of his life," 
  'The Summing Up' and 'A Writer's Notebook' (joined with 'The Summing Up'
  to make 'The Partial View').

  For interesting as those three travel volumes are, they are dwarfed by the 
  fascinating vignettes Mr. Iyer has put together from those later works. They 
  run the gamut from actual notes for what, duly transmogrified by his 
  artist's refracting lense, became renowned fiction to recollections of 
  dreams, one of them opium-induced. So we even get glimpses into the 
  subconscious of this generally guarded and cagey individual. But more
  often we are treated to accounts of his travels in the South Seas, especially 
  Tahiti (location for much of one his best novels, "The Moon and Sixpence"), 
  India and Russia. But whether he is giving a description of the Nevsky 
  Prospekt in St. Petersburg during World War I or a Texas motel during
  World War II, Maugham is never anything less than totally fresh and original
  in his slant.

  Few writers were more engaged in the actual world than Maugham. Trained
  as a medical doctor, he never actually practiced, but his experiences as a 
  student and for a time in World War I on the Western Front (vividly described
  here) gave him an unusual insight into the physical side of life. As did his
  scorching libido, almost never directly referred to in this book, which was
  the engine of so much restlessness and which impelled him towards the
  seamier locales wherever he voyaged.

  In World War I, he was an active operative in Britain's intelligence 
  service, first in Switzerland and then on an important - and of course 
  ultimately unsuccessful - mission to keep Russia in the war on the Allied 
  side after the revolution of March 1917. Some of the most interesting, 
  albeit brief, sections of this volume deal with Maugham's experiences
  as a spy, something he put to good use in the 1920s in his classic "Ashenden" 
  short stories.

  Maugham was never just a tourist: there was always an underlying purpose to 
  his visits, usually the gathering of raw material for his fiction. Sometimes 
  this showed up in novels like "The Painted Veil," "Of Human Bondage" and 
  "The Razor's Edge" in addition to "The Moon and Sixpence." But you see it 
  even more in those magnificent short stories that may well be his chief 
  claim to posterity. More elaborate and much more developed than most in the 
  genre, he drew upon his knowledge of languages and wide acquaintance with 
  European literature to assimilate the stories of Guy De Maupassant and Anton 
  Chekhov and produce something often their equal and, more surprisingly, on 
  occasion their superior.

  Most often this occurs in those longer stories, collected in the volume he 
  titled "East and West," set in the South Seas or in Asian outposts of the 
  British Empire. Singapore, Borneo, Malaya and the Pacific Islands provide 
  the backdrop to such classic tales as "The Letter" or "Rain." Both these 
  were successfully (and in the case of the latter successively) filmed by 
  Hollywood. Indeed, "Rain" was such a hit on page, screen and stage that it 
  alone made Maugham a millionaire at a time when that meant a great deal. 
  When you realize what Maugham was able to spin from the three brief sketches 
  reprinted in this volume - drily annotated by him "On these three notes I 
  constructed a story called 'Rain' " - it is clear that ultimately, the 
  travel and the travel writing were means to an end: the creation of a 
  distinctive type of fiction all his own. And it will always be this for 
  which we value him rather from that necessary but still inferior raw 
  material.

  Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.
  ======================

  --- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar
     



  ooroo


  Bad typists of the word, untie.










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