Maugham
I am rereading William Somerset Maugham’s autobiography The Summing Up at the moment. And I still think it is a delightful book, full of sarcasm and useful remarks about writing. But, I have been rereading it for more than a fortnight now, which indicates something as well. Too much Maugham a day is difficult to digest.
The same sentiment is shared in this New Criterion essay, in which Anthony Daniels tries to answer the question how good a writer Maugham really was.
Was he a great writer? I don’t think the question is important, though it is always raised in his case. But we should value him for what he wrote, not for what others wrote, or for what he didn’t write, or for what he should have written if he had been more ‘advanced.’ Suffice it to say that I think he will still be read in a hundred years, if anyone reads at all, that is. Perhaps his firm and extremely forceful views on English prose, while a pleasure themselves to read, have harmed his reputation, for he has been taken to imply that everyone should write like him, which is clearly absurd. I certainly wouldn’t want every writer to write like him, any more than I would like every writer to write like Sir Thomas Browne, or indeed like anyone else. To read too much of him at a sitting makes one aware of a certain flatness or insipidity in his prose, which at first had seemed bracingly direct and unadorned, as well as urbane.
[x]#390 fan donderdag 5 februari 2004 @ 13:06:39
