THE TECHNICIAN
Christmas Holiday. By W. Somerset Maugham. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) IT is often amusing when reading the book of an established writer to pretend to oneself that his name is unknown, and that one has casually picked up a first novel, and to ask whether, if one were a publisher's reader, one would recommend its acceptance without misgivings ; if one were a critic, whether one would foretell its author's brilliant future. The result is sometimes illuminating. In the case of Mr. Maugham, however, this kind of make-believe fails in the first page. One realises immediately that one is dealing with the work of a highly experienced writer, and one reads it with a feeling of increasing respect for his mastery of his trade. One has the same delight as in watching a first-class cabinet-maker cutting dovetails ; in the days of bakelite that is a rare and bewitching experience. In the days of dictated " thinking-aloud " writing Mr. Maugham's accomplishment is yearly more exhilarating. He is, I believe, the only living studio-master under whom one can study with profit. He has no marked idiosyncrasies which threaten the pupil with bad habits. His virtues of accuracy, economy, and control are those most lacking today among his juniors.
For pure technical felicity I think his new novel is his best. It is the story of the Christmas holiday in Paris of a well-to-do, well-mannered, mildly cultured and quite exceptionally charm- ing young Englishman. The important point about the hero is that he is not a prig. It is a common complaint that in modern novels there are too few likeable characters. Well, here is Charley. He goes to Paris for a few days' treat. The boy, Simon, who, until a year or two before, had been his best friend, is living there as a journalist. One of Charley's motives in coming is to renew their friendship. He finds a monomaniac. Simon had had an unhappy upbringing. Charley, in fact, was the sole being who had given him affection, and he had returned it fully. Now the perverse conditions of his childhood have reasserted their importance. He has developed a lust for power which takes the form of the ambition to be chief of the secret police under the political regime which he foresees in England—a .-egime to be established by communists, but in Simon's eyes bereft of all features except power.
To fit himself for this career he adopts a kind of satanic asceticism, physical and spiritual. No monk struggled more ruthlessly to expel sin than Simon struggles to expel goodness. His love for Charley is one of the things he is seek- ing to turn out of his life. Outrageous as this character is, and ludicrous as he would appear in other hands than Mr. Maugham's, he is here completely convincing. Not unnaturally Charley finds the encounter an unhappy prelude to the good time he has promised himself. At a house of ill fame—whose sous-maitresse deliciously says, " Sometimes I think the life we lead is a little narrow "—he meets a Russian with whom, platonically and reluctantly, he spends the whole of his little holiday. She is the wife of a murderer, and she is working as a prostitute with the preposterous belief that she can thus expiate her husband's crime—preposterous, but again absolutely con- vincing. Mr. Maugham has elsewhere, more than once, given evidence of the belief that association with a Russian is a necessary part of an Englishman's adult education. Lydia teaches Charley to admire Chardin—at least, she teaches him by her own intense response to Chardin what it is to look at a picture. She tells him the story of her own disastrous marriage to a habitual criminal. This recitation occupies the greater part of the book. It is brilliantly done and needs studying closely in detail; the transitions from direct speech to stylised narrative, the change of narrator as Simon takes up part of the story, the suspense that is created even though the reader already knows what the climax will be, are models of technique. Charley meets in her company two returned con- victs from Cayenne, one of whom has stayed on an extra two years in order to befriend his companion. He has some further conversations with Simon ending in a brutal parting. Then rather glumly he returns home. His family receive him with joy; his father with a kind of vicarious lubricity. The last sentence is this : " Only one thing had happened to him, it was rather curious when you came to think of it, and he didn't just then quite know what to do about it : the bottom had fallen out of his world."
But what has really happened is that the bottom has fallen out of Mr. Maugham's book in this prodigious piece of bathos. All that inimitable artistry to end in this climax ! For what does it amount to? Charley had led what is called a sheltered life, meeting mostly people who led the same kind of life or who accepted it as normal. In Paris he has been rather roughly introduced to some people with quite different ideas and habits. He must have known, intellectually, that they existed; he must have known that there were head-hunters in Borne.) and monks in Tibet and lunatics in asylums who had totally different views of the universe. What was before an intellec- tual abstraction is now real and concrete to him. All he has learned is the heterogenity of mankind. It is a valuable lesson; some people never learn it. But his own virtues of kindness and tolerance and humour and honesty are still virtues, his bed is still as comfortable and his dinner as satisfying, he has not received any compelling call, such as does apparently from time to time change people's lives, to any different destiny. He has lost a friend who, anyway, had not meant much to him in recent years; otherwise he .has merely had an instructive and profitable holiday, and will be just the same kind of fellow in future with a slightly wider and wiser outlook.
EVELYN WAUGH.
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