Maugham's Characters

BOOK REVIEWS and career of Massey (to which might be added Ulrike Schwab's The Poetry of the Chartist Movement: A Literary and Historical Study [Dordrecht, 1993]), some interesting photographs, and a very useful index. David Shaw's achievement will undoubtedly long stand as the best work on this very interesting Victorian poet and freethinker. J. O. Baylen Professor Emeritus Eastbourne, England Maugham's Characters Samuel J. Rogal. A Companion to the Characters in the Fiction and Drama of W. Somerset Maugham. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996. xvii + 468 pp. $75.00 IT WAS 1894. The twenty-year-old William Somerset Maugham was in the third year of the five he would spend in the medical school of St. Thomas's Hospital, London, when he made this entry in one of his first notebooks: "It is a good maxim to ask of no one more than he can give without inconvenience to himself." If their meaning is slightly extended, Maugham's words bear some relevance to this comprehensive, alphabetical listing of more than 5000 of his characters. If the maxim is specifically appUed to the compiler and/or consumer of lists, it might read as follows: Ask of no one more than can be compiled without inconvenience to either or both. Before examining some of the evidences of "inconvenience," the reviewer should register his admiration for the awesome task that has been undertaken by Professor Rogal, who is chair of the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts at Illinois Valley Community College. He or his computer has culled from Maugham's twenty-one novels, 113 stories, and thirty-three plays every character who has made an appearance or been referred to. Works covered include those available in standard editions plus seventeen "lost" stories written between 1898 and 1908 and omitted from the collected edition, and three unpublished plays. Rogal has not stinted. His list includes most of the characters who are mentioned but take no part in the plots. There are, for example, nine Athelnys in Of Human Bondage besides the three who are vital to the story—Thorpe, who befriends Philip near the end, his common-law wife Betty, and Sally, one of the Athelnys' nine children and Philip's apparent bride-to-be. The painters so frequently cited by Philip and his fellow students during his phase as an art student in Paris go unmentioned although some historical figures are included. Those with minor parts 121 ELT 40:1 1997 are often identified by occupation, profession, gender, or title. One finds fifty-nine entries for "boy," sixty-four for "doctor," and forty for "waiter." Groups of unnamed characters are also listed in the plural: "women" (forty-eight), "bachelors" (five). Rogal stresses at the end of his ten-page introduction that "this volume does not intend to serve as a quick and ready substitute for close and careful reading of Maugham's fiction and drama." His disclaimer should not have excused the compiler from asterisking the important names from the major novels, the most anthologized stories, and plays like The Circle, The Constant Wife, and Our Betters that are still performed frequently. He comes closest to a defining policy on the content of the citations when he acknowledges that "what follows provides, essentially, physical descriptions." But he also claims to have provided "highlights of [characters'] principal functions and actions," although "only enough so that each can be seen as within his or her role as a Maugham person. Entries must not be considered as plot summaries ." Rogal need not have worried. He has stockpiled physical elements down to minute details. Cronshaw, the burned-out poet-philosopher in Of Human Bondage is given seventeen lines that note his drunkenness but not his brilliant conversations that culminate with his confronting the concerned hero with the riddle of the Persian carpet that becomes the heart of Maugham's bildungsroman. In one of Maugham's classic stories of an unexpected role reversal, Max Kelada of "Mr. Know-AU" tells a noble lie to spare a bejewelled woman humiliation. Rogal's four-line entry tells the reader he is a Levantine and a trader in pearls. Prurience over Maugham's homosexuality led to a flurry...