Somerset Maugham

ELT 37 : 3 1994 He was, however, only one of many distributors of this underground literature. The detailed bibliographical discussions of individual titles are followed by checklists of erotic pamphlets, notes on printers and booksellers doing business between 1800 and 1884, and of titles of forbidden books published during the same period. Appendixes include abstracts of press reports regarding legal actions brought against publishers and distributors of some of the titles, and quotations from several memoirs relating to a number of the personalities connected with the furtive trade in these notorious volumes. Indexes of themes, titles and names conclude this encyclopedic study, which appears to be the definitive examination of the subject. The result may not be the final word on the bibliographical problems presented by the intentionally misleading title-pages of these subterranean examples of English erotic fiction, but certainly any further investigation on their origin will be based on the measured conclusions of Professor Mendes. Edwin Gilcher _______________ Cherry Plain, New York Somerset Maugham Stanley Archer. W. Somerset Maugham: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. xii + 135 pp. $23.95 SOMERSET MAUGHAM was an unusually versatile author, one who realized considerable success in at least three genres. Among his twenty novels, Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and Cakes and Ale are achievements of a high order. His twenty-five plays put him in the forefront of dramatists on both sides of the Atlantic for nearly three decades, and The Circle and The Constant Wife will continue to be revived for many years. Taken together, his more than 100 short stories are a collection to match that of any other twentieth-century British writer. Finally, his dozen works of non-fiction includes The Summing Up, which has become a classic philosophical autobiography. Despite this prolific output—or perhaps because of it—Maugham has never on the whole been treated seriously by literary scholars. During his lifetime, he was generally considered to be a skilful craftsman, a storyteller writing for middlebrow readers. Though he died in 1965, it has been only recently that academics in any numbers have begun to examine his work critically and to recognize its depth and artistry. Much of this focus, as in the few scholarly studies published previously, has 396 BOOK REVIEWS been on the novels and the plays, or on thematic development in his work in general. Except for an occasional article, there has been little critical attention paid to Maugham's short stories, which many readers familiar with the breadth of his output argue will be the work for which he will ultimately be remembered. In his South Seas and Far East tales, he created and populated a world uniquely his, and careful readings of such stories as "Rain," "The Pool," "Red," "The Outstation," The Alien Com," and many others, reveal subtleties and depths which have previously gone unrecognized . Thus, Stanley Archer's W. Somerset Maugham: A Study of the Short Fiction is especially welcome, promising as it does to be "the first thorough analysis of the writer's shorter works." The problem with this book, however, is that while it is thorough in the sense of covering almost every short story Maugham ever wrote, it is short on analysis. Archer's text is only seventy pages long and consists almost entirely of plot summaries with very little critical content. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the treatment of The Letter," one of the author's most famous and interesting tales. After retelling the story in three paragraphs, Archer concludes: The story qualifies as a murder mystery, and although the mystery is solved, the guilty person goes unpunished. It features a galaxy of interesting characters and exceptionally strong dramatic conflict." Nothing is said of the story's superb portrayal of the politics of the British imperial presence, the racial tension underlying the facade of civilized colonialism, or the dichotomy between appearance and reality graphically portrayed by the murderess's skilful and unqualified return to colonial society after her arranged acquittal. Ironically, Archer shows what can be done when one closely examines a Maugham story when he includes a short essay by Archie K. Loss that discusses...