Volume 25, Number 18 · November 23, 1978
Slippery Fish
By Robert Mazzocco
Conversations with Willie: Recollections of W. Somerset Maugham
by Robin Maugham
Simon & Schuster, 188 pp., $8.95
Conversations with Willie is an intermittently entertaining memoir, but its details can be careless (at one point Robin Maugham speaks of Arnold Toynbee when it is obvious he means Philip), and parts of the reminiscences are now and again so chatty or unreflective, the dialogue so studied (even for literary people) as to appear spurious. Usually the scene is dinner at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat during Maugham's last decades, the garrulous uncle 'looking back,' the attentive nephew ever ready to collate the crumbs that fall from the great man's table. Edwina Mountbatten, Aleister Crowley, the Duc de Nemours, Lady Churchill…the famous names fly past. Some of Maugham's comments are odious, some twinkling. On Lord Beaverbrook: 'He's got a crush on me. But I'm eighty-seven, and he's eighty-three, so I think it's rather unlikely, don't you?' There are megalomaniacal regrets over a meeting with Kerensky when Maugham was a British agent during the War ('Perhaps if I hadn't made a hash of it in Russia, the whole world would be different'), and his celebrated stammer, the blight of his life, is good for a chuckle or two. 'I'm told there's a pensioner in Nice who's still alive and kicking at one hundred and four,' a lady affably tells him at a luncheon in his honor. 'Fer-fer-fer-fuck one hundred and four,' the nonagenarian replies.
Review, 4944 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |