Good morning, readers and book lovers, and welcome to yet another open forum! (Tired of them yet? You know what to do—kosmail me to say you'll contribute a diary.) Today we'll talk about writers who used to be popular but who have now become unfashionable.
But first, breakfast! Guess who pulled on her Wellies and traipsed through the dew-heavy grass in the backyard to pick raspberries for your delectation? Moi, bien sûr, and I have the scratches to prove it. Accompanying the sweet ripe raspberries is a bowl of silky vanilla yogurt, and to make the meal complete, almond croissants. They're from La Madeleine bakery and of a deliciousness impossible to describe. Naturellement, the only drink possible with this repast is French Roast coffee, along with sugar and cream.
Now, replete, let's move our feet—into the salon.
Do fashions in books come and go? When one contemplates just the hundred years between 1900 and 2000, I’d have to say, yes, they do. Think of the leisurely pace at which novels used to unfold: what reader would stand for that now? We don’t want to hear about every egg stain on the waistcoat, nor do we necessarily want to know about the hero’s long, horselike, yellow teeth unless the description of said teeth advances the plot in some way.
The writers of the 1920s, the 1930s, and 1940s were very different from those of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. There was a time when profanity wasn’t allowed in dialogue, can you believe that? Agent after agent in New York sent back the manuscript of my father’s novel, which contained faithful renditions of how newsboys talked in the 1930s. The literary agents didn’t want to know about the profane newsboy conversations.
In those pre-Internet times, reading was an acceptable and widely practiced hobby, and many were the best sellers written by S. S. Van Dine, Frances Parkinson Keyes, Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, Frank Yerby, Nevil Shute, Lloyd C. Douglas, Somerset Maugham, and others like them. Who today remembers such blockbuster novels as Forever Amber, Anthony Adverse, and Scaramouche?
To my mind, the writer who least deserves obscurity is Somerset Maugham. Of Human Bondage is, of course, timeless, as are The Moon and Sixpence and The Razor’s Edge.
Born at the British Embassy in Paris because his father wanted him to escape the French law that says any male born on French soil is liable for conscription when grown, Maugham’s first language was French, not English.
Much of his early life forms the basis for the account of the early years of the fictional Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage. The Wiki says of Maugham’s career:
"He became known as a writer who portrayed the last days of colonialism in India, Southeast Asia, China and the Pacific, although the books on which this reputation rests represent only a fraction of his output."
It is this aspect of Maugham’s literary output that fascinates me so much. The “I” of Somerset Maugham’s short stories personifies that peculiar quality noted by people of many cultures over the years—what Josephine Tey calls “the eternal mystery of the English.”
"You watch a procession of monks in Italy and your eye singles out one and you say 'Ha! An Englishman.' You come across five hoboes wrapped in gunny sacks sheltering from the rain in Wisconsin and you notice the fifth and think, 'Dear goodness, that chap’s English.' You see ten men stripped to the buff for the Foreign Legion doctor to pass judgement on and you say—But come to lunch and we can explore the subject at leisure.”
Who is this “I” of Maugham’s colonial short stories, who seems to have infinite money and leisure to travel the world and make his way through exotic places—many of them primitive, hot, and insect-infested—while the rest of us prefer to remain in unadventurous comfort at home?
The Englishman who finds himself spending time on an island on the north coast of Borneo; who serves his government as a consul in Cheng-tu, a lonely city in Szechuan, China, from whose "crenellated walls one can see the snowy peaks of Tibet at sunset"; the aging chap working at his job until he can retire and go home to England—all tell their life stories to Maugham’s “I” in the middle of the night, secure in the knowledge that he will be taking the first boat out in the morning and they will never meet again.
Here’s an excerpt from one such story, “Masterson,” in which Masterson explains to the narrator of the story why he couldn’t marry the Burmese woman he had lived with for several years.
“But if you were so fond of her why on earth didn’t you marry her? It had been a great success.”
“I’ll tell you. If I married her I’d have to stay in Burma for the rest of my life. Sooner or later I shall retire and then I want to go back to my old home and live there. I don’t want to be buried out here, I want to be buried in an English churchyard. I want England. I want grey skies and a soft rain falling and the smell of the country. I don’t want to shoot tigers, I want to shoot rabbits. I want to feel under my feet the grey pavement of an English country town, I want to be able to go have a row with the butcher because the steak he sent me yesterday was tough, and I want to browse about second-hand bookshops. I want to be said how d’you do to in the street by people who knew me when I was a boy. I dare say it all sounds very humdrum and provincial and dull to you, but that’s the sort of life my people have always lived and the sort of life I want to live myself. It’s a dream if you like, but it’s all I have, it means everything in the world to me, and I can’t give it up."
He paused for a moment and looked into my eyes.
“Do you think me an awful fool?”
“No.”
And so the “I” in Maugham’s stories wanders the Far East, from Mandalay to Singapore, from Haiphong to Hong Kong, collecting stories of love, betrayal, and heartbreak. There are stories of Europe, too—Antibes, Seville, Positano. With sufficient time and no pressing outside concerns, one could spend an entire weekend traveling with Maugham by means of his stories, having a drink at
The Long Bar of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, eating asparagus dripping with melted butter in Paris, enjoying ham and eggs in Algeciras, Spain.
I think it was having read Maugham’s short stories so thoroughly in my teenaged years that influenced me to set out on my own, at age twenty-one, for a country three thousand miles away. I didn’t fear being alone because I knew that I, like Somerset Maugham, might have all sorts of adventures—which supposition did indeed come to pass (see my future diary, “Traipsing Around England, 1965”).
But enough about my favorite “unfashionable” author. Who is YOURS? How long has his or her work languished unread and mostly forgotten? Do you still go back and read the books he or she wrote? Tell us, we’re all ears!