Volume 51, Number 20 · December 16, 2004
Summing Him Up
By Pico Iyer
Somerset Maugham: A Life
by Jeffrey Meyers
Knopf, 411 pp., $30.00
'The critic I am waiting for,' wrote Somerset Maugham in a letter near the end of his life, 'is the one who will explain why, with all my faults, I have been read for so many years by so many people.' The edge of defensiveness was unusual in a man who generally accepted that he had more readers than friends or admirers, but the perceptiveness itself was characteristic. A century after Maugham's literary career began, the other best-selling writers of his day, even those who won the Nobel Prize, such as Pearl Buck and John Galsworthy, have been largely forgotten; many of the 'serious writers' by whom he was often eclipsed, Hardy and Joyce among them, are mostly read in college courses. Yet even some of the most discerning readers I know continue to push Maugham's sales beyond the 40 million mark, and even such slight pieces of fiction as the Riviera romance Up at the Villa and the minor novel Theatre have been turned into contemporary movies.
Review, 4868 words
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