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Maugham cites his own example. He once met a dull couple at a dull dinner. The man had been a civil servant in Asia, and the only memorable thing about him was that he was a onetime drunk, taking a bottle to bed with him every night and finishing it before morning. His wife seemed a drab mediocrity, but she had cured her husband of drink. Out of this, Maugham contrived a superb story (Before the Party), which begins in a prim country dwelling, turns into a confession by the fat widow that she had slashed her backsliding husband to death with a parang one hot afternoon in Borneo. After the confession, they all go to the vicar's garden party.
Well, how many wives married to drunkards have not had the same impulse? And gone on to parties? Or take the case of Rain. Maugham saw a prostitute hurry aboard his Tahiti-bound boat. A missionary and his wife were also aboard, and on arrival in Pago Pago, the group was thrown into quarantine because of a measles epidemic. Maugham added a tropical rain season to the measles, and made the confrontation of missionary and whore into a classic contest between righteousness and sin. What man (or clergyman) has not felt the visceral taint of the sensual in his ostensibly selfless concern for a pretty sinner's soul?
Maugham was by nature, and by his own admission, cold and withdrawn. "There are very few people who know anything about me. And even they do not know as much as they imagine." He was a watcher, not a participant.
But if he was cold, it was because he was unwarmed. At ten, he was an orphan in a strange land. His father had been solicitor to the British embassy in Paris. His mother, afflicted with chronic tuberculosis, had had children at regular intervals on doctors' advice —pregnancy was thought to be good for tuberculosis in those days—and eight years after Somerset's birth she died. His father died soon thereafter. The boy was shipped off to England to become the unwanted ward of an uncle.
Shy, afflicted with a humiliating stammer, the young Maugham recoiled in misery from the hostile new environment. At the vicarage, his uncle pumped him so full of religion that Maugham ultimately rejected God; he remained a nonbeliever all his life. At King's School in Canterbury, classmates and even the headmaster mocked his speech impediment. These unhappy transplanted years were later to appear in Of Human Bondage, the most intensely autobiographical of his novels. Even years later, he was unable to read it without tears.
The writer in Maugham emerged at medical school in London, where before getting his degree he waded systematically, if surreptitiously, through the classics and published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, in 1897. Maugham was 23. Liza was only a modest success, but on the strength of it, he abandoned medicine for good.
Within eleven years he had scored his stunning triumph on the London stage. The theater gave him just what he had hoped to get from it: money and fame. Both became fixtures of his life. When critics accused him of writing for mere profit, he countered by saying: "I've found out that money was like a sixth sense without which you could not make the most of the other five."
Spareness and Clarity