Here & There

A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK (367 pp.)--W. Somerset Maugham--Doubleday ($4).

Five years ago, having reached his allotted three-score-years-and-ten, Somerset Maugham took a long look at himself, reached for his notebook, and jotted down a sort of bank balance of his mental and physical condition. It showed:

Own Teeth: Twentysix.

Wind & Limb: Perfectly "sound in."

Income: Enough to live "in comfort" and gratify "whims."

Intimations of Immortality: None ("I am content . . . that my soul . . . will dissolve into nothingness").

Intimations of Posterity: Some ("Two or three plays and a dozen short stories" may survive "for a good many years").

Attitude to Death: "Quite willing to vacate [my] little niche."

Attitude to Maugham: "I have made the most ... of such gifts as nature provided."

Attitude to Others: "I no longer mind . . . They can take me or leave me."

Maugham admirers had a right to expect that, with the maestro so well set and devil-may-care, his personal Notebook would be as breezy as, say, the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope (in which the old fox hunter posthumously appalled his huge public by admitting with a gay cackle that money had always been his muse). But where other note-makers have nailed their colors to the mast and let their hair down to the last soiled lovelock, urbane Maugham has preferred to soak his colors in bleach and pin his hair in a tight bun. His Notebook (the whittlings-down of "fifteen stoutish volumes") contains mostly workaday jottings from 1892 (when he had just started to write) to 1949 (when he suggests that he is just about to stop). "I publish it," he explains, "because I am interested in the ... process of creation ... By some happy chance what interests me seems to interest a great many other people."

The snag is that few ears besides Author Maugham's are likely to pick up the trumpet call of inspiration from yesterday's commonplaces ("The [Fijian] chief who received me was a nephew of the last king and . . . was dressed in a pair of short white pants"). Moreover, though he may be forgiven for crooning in the days of his youth, "My soul seemed a stringed instrument upon which the Gods were playing a melody of despair," it is wearying, 40 years later, to hear the same theme strummed on the same wet banjo: "The moan of the wind in the [South Carolina] pine trees was like the distant singing of the colored people, singing their sad song to a heedless . . . God."

"He does not know," noted Maugham of a man he met in the Far East, "how many of the notions he has hammered out in suffering and meditation are lamentably commonplace ... On the other hand, now and then, he has a charming and even original thought."

This is a good verdict for Notebook itself. Here & there a lively or charming note intrudes. There is a fine account of how Maugham discovered (and bought) a Gauguin that the artist had painted on a rotting door in a South Sea shack. And there are a few records of conversations in which the Maugham soul tightens its instrumental strings, and he begins to sound like the man who wrote Of Human Bondage, e.g., the summing-up by a Cockney woman of her brutal, just-buried husband : "He wasn't a bad man really. D'you know what he said to me? They was almost his last words. 'I've given you hell, haven't I? You'll be glad to be rid of me.' 'No, I won't, Ned,' I said to him, 'you know I've always loved you.' He gave me a funny look, and d'you know what he said? 'You old cow,' he said. That shows he loved me really, doesn't it? -- calling me an old cow like that, I mean."

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