"YEARS ago, when William Somerset Maugham was a young man of 64, he turned his thoughts to a subject of considerable importance to him: a fitting end to his own story. "Having held a certain place in the world for a long time," Maugham wrote in The Summing Up, "I am content that others soon should occupy it. When nothing can be added without spoiling the design the artist leaves it."
But the end was too long in coming: 27 years. The design was spoiled and it sorely strained the patience of the man who was dedicated to the idea that a well-constructed narrative should draw to a swift and orderly close. At his seaside villa on Cap Ferrat, going deaf and blind, Maugham complained bitterly at the way time's slow hand was writing his last chapter. "I am sick of this way of life," he said. "I want to die." Earlier this month, he sank into a coma following a stroke. The 91-year-old heart beat six days longer in a hospital outside Nice. And then last week it stopped.
His death committed to posterity the work of one of the most productive, most popular, most successful and most versatile authors of the century. This year alone, some 2,000,000 copies of his books will be added to the 80 million already in print. The Razor's Edge has sold more than 5,000,000 copies since its appearance in 1944. Of Human Bondage, published in 1915 when Maugham was 41, has entered literature courses and has been adapted three times to film. At least two Maugham characters—Mildred Rogers in Bondage and Sadie Thompson in Rain—belong to that distinctive fictional company that the world will not forget.
Characters in Action
Rich beyond most writers' dreams, Maugham became a kind of semipublic personage, a figure of Edwardian origin and habits, projecting an Ed wardian image on modern scenes. He looked like a character from one of his own novels: heavily lined patrician features, thin lips turned down at the corners, hooded eyes. Traveling the world in search of stories, he napped after lunch wherever he happened to be—aboard a tramp ship plowing the South Seas, in a Burmese hut or an outrigger canoe. Churchill, Wells, Cocteau, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Kings of Sweden and Siam called on him at Villa Mauresque, his Moorish retreat on the Riviera where, working never more and never less than four hours a morning, he set down most of his books.
Though he got away from common men as soon as he could and avoided them when possible, it was from common men that his invention took flight. "The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements," he once said. His boast was that "I could not spend an hour in anyone's company without getting the material to write at least a readable story about him."
For this, he was often described as a mere storyteller. Today, after Joyce and Freud, "storyteller" is somehow considered a term of denigration, and critics may reasonably question the depth of Maugham's insights. But he was able to do supremely well what storytellers are supposed to do—to dramatize character by putting that character into action, a specific action that displays in kinetic terms his or her faults and virtues.
Measles and Rain