Reticent Writer

THE SUMMING UP -- W. Somerset Maugham--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

In London in 1907, at the age of 33, William Somerset Maugham became a success. Four of his plays were produced, and three of them ran for a year. He has remained successful ever since. "In my twenties," he says, "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 now in my sixties they say I am superficial." Last week, in The Summing Up, Author Maugham gave readers passing reasons for agreeing with the critics of each decade. But he also gave them a candid appraisal of his own temperament and accomplishments, some shrewd reflections on writing, some common-sense aphorisms, about as few revelations of his personal life as it would be possible for an autobiographer to give.

The Summing Up begins with a discouraging catalogue of Maugham's reasons for not writing an autobiography. He has a poor memory. His life has not been adventurous. He has written so many novels that he can scarcely distinguish fact from fiction in his work. "I can never remember a good story," he complains, "till I hear it again and then I forget it before I have had a chance to tell it to somebody else." But he realized that it would "exasperate" him if he should die before he had written down his thoughts on the subjects that have chiefly interested him. Since these turn out to be mainly literature and the theatre, most of The Slimming Up is given over to studied critical comment: opinions on the prose of Dryden and Swift, on the literary value of the writings of English philosophers, on professional writers as opposed to amateurs, on the reasons for the egotism of actors, on the pernicious influence of Bernard Shaw on the English stage, on the excitement of rehearsals and the confused & troubling experience of first nights. Maugham's criticism is neither theatrical nor brilliant. It resembles the offhand observations that a busy artist might make to students whose abilities seem to him to be highly questionable.

"There is not much to choose between men," Maugham says. "They are all a hotchpotch of greatness and littleness, of virtue and vice, of nobility and baseness." Doubting that he is any better or worse than others, he explains his own career in terms of his temperament. His parents died before he was ten, and he was educated by a severe clergyman uncle--he would wake up at night dreaming that his mother was still alive and that he was home again. He was small, shy, sickly, and stammered badly. He confesses to an "instinctive shrinking" from his fellow men, and even when he drinks gets sick before he reaches "the state of intoxication that enables so many . . . to look upon all men as their brothers. . . ."

"My sympathies are limited. . . . I can never forget myself. . . . Though I have been in love a good many times I have never experienced the bliss of requited love. . . . I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed." Never having felt "some of the fundamental emotions of normal men," Maugham feels that his work is handicapped. But the thought leaves him untroubled. Literary immortality is brief, he says, is generally the immortality of the schoolroom, and the kind of theatre in which he has triumphed is bound to disappear soon.

Writing of Swift, Maugham says, "Swift's prose is like a French canal, bordered with poplars, that runs through a gracious and undulating country. Its tranquil charm fills you with satisfaction, but it neither excites the emotions nor stimulates the imagination. You go on and on and presently you are a trifle bored." These are strange words to describe the writing of the mad Irishman, but they expertly sum up The Summing Up.

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