Fiction
The Complete Short Stories of Somerset Maugham. Volumes
11 and III. (Heinemann. t 2s. 6d. each).
The Pillar. BN; Da% id Walker. (Collins. 125. 6d.) Prisoner's Base. By Mary Mitchell. (Methuen. 12s. 6d,) THE concentration into three volumes of stories scattered in a lifetime of writing for magazines appears to be mildly disturbing to Mr. Somerset Maugham. He is at pains to rearrange them for the sake of variety, so that, with the exception of the Ashenden spy-stories, which are alto wed one continuous sequence in the second volume, he breaks up the subject-matter and the chronology, leaving the curious with nothing more revealing than a stack of magazines from which the dates have been removed. But there is a repetitive quality in Mr. Maugham hims!lf, an almost compulsive probing of certain facts and situations, which is too strongly marked for concealment in 4600 pages. So that, here, in spite of himself, he is.
" It is one of the advantages of democratic government," says one of his characters, a French Governor, in A Marriage of Convenience, written as far back as 1906, " that if you have sufficient influence, merit, which might otherwise pass unnoticed, generally receives its due reward." In 1906, although' he had a successful novel on the scoreboard, it is fair to say that Mr. Maugham himself had not received the reward of his merit, but by 1931 he undoubtedly had, and we are surprised, if we are paying attention to trifles, to find practically no adjustment to the long-forgotten mot of the Frenchman a full quarter of a century later, when the District Officer in The Door of Opportunity remarks, "The great advantage of democratic. government is that merit, with influence to back it, can be pretty sure of receiving its reward." And .although the aphorism might be thought somewhat flat for this degree of repetition, we find him toying with it a decade later still in The Summing Up. "I do not," he there concludes, " arrogantly ascribe to my merits what has come to me, but to some concatenation of unlikely circumstances for which I can offer no explanation." Success and failure, in the most generally accepted sense of the words, are among Mr. Maugham's minor obsessions.
But in this three-volume summary of his interests, we are equally struck by the omissions. In the last of the new prefaces Mr. Maugham confesses that the life he describes in Malaya in the 'twenties and 'thirties no longer exists. "Aviation," he says, "has changed all that." "Aviation? "we ask ourselves. And he explains the effect on the characters of the officials and planters which the long sea communications of the old days inevitably produced. As a sub- sidiary change he indeed notes what is called "the emergency." But that is quite new and arbitrary : "It may be that some of those peoples, Malays, Dyaks, Chinese, were restive under the British rule, but there was no outward sign of it." Strangely enough within fifty pages of this statement Mr. Maugham reprints a description of a revolt among Chinese coolies, which he wrote twenty years ago. The description is a brief one, and his only interest is the vivid light thrown on the cowardice of a District Officer whose career is broken by it.
One should add that there is nothing blind or accidental in Mr. Maugham 's detachment from the more fundamental issues of our time. To have introduced a digression on the stirring of nationalism and race-consciousness into such a story would not only have des- troyed its superb concentration and unity ; it would have been remote from the interests of the public for which he was writing. Mr. Maugham is too considerable an artist to have denied himself a passionate interest in the particular character patterns which fascinate him, but he keeps within the limits required by the magazine editors between the wars. "The aim of the writer of fiction," he says in his lecture The Writer's Point of View, which was published by the National Book League last month," is not to instruct, but to please. If readers want to inform themselves on the pressing problems of the day they will do well to read, not novels, but the works that specific- ally deal with them." The view is a neat inversion of a directive issued by the late Comrade Zhdanov, and one notes with regret that, while Dostoievsky and Wilde were deported by the latter, Tolstoy and Dickens are sent rejection slips by Mr. Maugham.
There are fortunately novels of which the reviewer can only say : Read this, it is good. Mr. David Walker's The Pillar presents us with a group of Allied prisoners in five years of war, so vividly, con- vincingly and with such a nice sense of values, that any summary, including the publisher's on the dust-jacket, is likely to put off the readers who would most enjoy it. At the risk of following suit, I would add that Mr. Walker has absorbed lessons in technique from Ernest Hemingway and the cinema without having sacrificed any- thing in depth oil freshness, and that he holds one's excitement as well as one's sympathy from the first page to the last.
It may be that novelists ask too much of their imagination in tackling situations which are by nature remote from their experience. The other novel on this list which deals with a prisoner-of-war has a blurred quality where it should be sharp, and an over-exact quality where it should be suggestive :
"He closed his hands, clenching them ever tighter until the pain of his long nails digging into his palms diverted his mind, and raising them to his mouth, he began biting them shorter."
It is in vain that Miss Mary Mitchell piles on such details in her anxiety to convince us of the reality of her hero's war-time nightmare in Prisoner's Base. Bob Broughty is a real arid exciting character as a shop-assistant in his Australian small-town, and there Miss Mitchell knows how to elicit our love for him and for those he loves, but we become careless from precisely that moment in the air over Germany when "he followed mechanically the routine he had practised so often during his training, pulled the release cord at just the right moment, and went through the inevitable agonised seconds wondering whether the parachute would open." Our interest returns in Australia after the war, but by then it is late.
The Sun Behind Me should have a topical attraction for those who wish to heighten their sympathy for the Egyptians. Setting her first novel in Cairo, Miss Ursula Keir scores mote heavily for her gift of penetrating the human mind just West of Suez than for her sense of artistic control. Mr. Powell Edwards in Margaretta's Choice shows an opposite tendency. Nicely constructed, his novel about the Countess Gilderoy (" a little bored, and not only with the river and the seasons of the year, but with him to whom she was married is too remote from humanity to be placed either West or East of
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