Table Talk at 79

THE VAGRANT MOOD: SIX ESSAYS (250 pp.) -- W. Somerset Maugham -- Doubleday ($3).

"My days as a professional writer are over," said Somerset Maugham in 1948. "I'm putting up the shutters, shutting up the shop. After all, I'm 75 next birthday . . . But if I think of an occasional little piece, I will write it." Since then, Somerset Maugham (now 79) has published his notebooks and thought of a few little pieces.

They appear in The Vagrant Mood, a slim volume of urbane table talk ranging from the decline of the detective story to Immanuel Kant's theory of beauty, from Edmund Burke's literary style to a profile of an eccentric 10th century English snob named Augustus Hare. Proof that the "Old Party's" writing hand has lost none of its cunning is the fact that he can make such unlikely subjects just as likeable reading as his personal memories of Novelists Henry James and H. G. Wells, which he tucks into the same book.

"As Soon as Weaned." Augustus Hare, author of Berks, Bucks and Oxfordshire, Walks in Rome, and other popular Victorian travel books, was an unwanted child. When his godmother asked to adopt him, his delighted mother wrote back: "How very kind of you. Yes, certainly the baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned; if anyone else would like one, would you kindly remember that we have others?" With "two little white nightshirts and a red coral necklace," Baby Augustus was packed off to his new home. His godmother was a religious fanatic who felt that happiness was next to ungodliness.

When he was four, his playthings were banished to the attic "so that he should learn that there were more serious things in life than toys." At the age of five, when he developed such "sinful propensities" as a love of lollipops, his rector uncle was called in to flog his bare bottom with a riding crop. Because he became understandably fond of a pet cat, it was taken from him and hanged.

Four Black Crosses. Though he might have become a monster, Augustus Hare grew up a mannerly eccentric. He never married, but about four times a year he drew a black cross in his journal to mark his incontinencies. When Maugham got to know him, Augustus Hare's days were already numbered, and swaddled in ritual. They began at 8 a.m. with a cup of tea and two slices of thin buttered bread. This was followed by morning prayers, Augustus reading, guests kneeling. Maugham found that Augustus had inked out many lines in the Book of Common Prayer, and asked why. "I've crossed out all the passages in glorification of God," said Hare. "God is certainly a gentleman, and no gentleman and no gentleman cares to be praised to his face."

What does Maugham do when he isn't writing about the Hares and the Sadie Thompsons of the world? Often, he admits in another essay, he curls up with a bad book, a whodunit. An outspoken fan of Raymond (The Big Sleep) Chandler, Maugham nonetheless argues that the detective story has been played out ever since readers wised up to, and writers exhausted, all possible plot gimmicks.

Catcalls & Cobwebs. During all his 79 years, says Maugham, he was "either too self-centered . . . or too shy" to get on confidential terms with fellow authors. He first saw Henry James when James was cat-called off the stage as he took a bow at the opening-night curtain of his play Guy Domville: "A stout man on stumpy legs . . . his jaw fallen . . . He was paralysed." So, implies Maugham, was his play. In 1910 he saw James in Cambridge, Mass., bewildered by America, terrified of streetcars, and utterly lonely ("I wander about these great empty streets of Boston and I never see a soul"). As for James's novels, Maugham sees them as "cobwebs . . . intricate, delicate and even beautiful, but which at any moment the housemaid's broom with brutal common sense may sweep away."

A man full of brutal common sense about himself, says Maugham, was H. G. Wells. Once, running his finger along a handsomely bound edition of his own collected works, he turned to Maugham with a grin and said: "They're as dead as mutton, you know. They all dealt with matters of topical interest and now that the matters aren't topical any more they're unreadable." Wells was sharp-witted but never malicious. Complimented once by Maugham for his patience with a highbrow bore, Wells chuckled and said: "When I was a member of the Fabian Society, I got a lot of practice in dealing with fools." Wells aroused an "enduring passion" in more than one woman, says Maugham, and since he himself found Wells "fat and homely," he was curious about the sources of his sex appeal. "I once asked one of his mistresses what especially attracted her in him. I expected her to say his acute mind and his sense of fun; not at all; she said that his body smelt of honey."

Wells died a hurt and disappointed man: "He had said the same things too often . . . When [people] listened to him it was . . . with the indulgence you accord to an old man who has outlived his interest." That fate does not worry Somerset Maugham. "I no longer mind," he once wrote in his notebooks. "They can take me or leave me."

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