Author: Somerset Maugham
Pages: 340
Published in the year: 1954
The one aspect among many others that draws one to Somerset Maugham's writing is the elegant simplicity and clear-headedness in them.
He can be a very compassionate writer, as The Painted Veil reveals. In Ten Novels And Their Authors his analytical abilities as a scholar and critic come to the fore
This particular book is especially illuminating as Maugham expounds on the various aspects of fiction writing and offers a detailed analysis of the books and authors he admires. Literary criticism can be both challenging and exhilarating for the writer and reader but it often makes for heavy reading. Maugham achieves that rare feat in writing a book that is as engaging as a novel yet full of original and insightful views on each author's work and craft. He links their writing closely to their personal lives.
The book is divided into twelve chapters. Two of them offer invaluable observations and insights on fiction writing and ten focus on different authors. In each of those, he discusses one major novel by that author.
The first chapter, The Art of Fiction discusses various elements of fiction writing - all greatly readable. For me, that has come to be the hallmark of Maugham's works --- He's that rare writer who never rambles. This quality helps in a study like this where one needs to be genuinely curious about another author's life and works. Maugham proves to be astute, and all his elaborations make a definite point.
This first chapter discusses some very important aspects of writing. Why does a reader feel tempted to skip lines or pages from a book? According to Maugham, the responsibility to engage a reader lies with the writer. He daringly points out how even some classic novels are unnecessarily long. He mentions Don Quixote in this regard and says that even if some chapters were to be edited out of the book, it would cause no serious loss to the reader in his/her enjoyment of it.
He also examines the choice of narrative voice. Should it be written from the standpoint of omniscience or in the first person? He believes the choice must depend on the subject at hand.
Maugham then considers what makes a good novel. Among the many qualities he discusses the central one is verisimilitude. “A story should be persuable. The episodes should have probability and should not only develop the theme but grow out of the story.”
He then goes on to talk about each author in considerable detail paying attention to the traits and episodes in the writer's life which may have had a part to play in the fiction they produced.
He observes how Charles Dickens could never really sketch out a gentleman very well because he'd never seen many of those kind in his childhood.
Emily Bronte's "strange, mysterious, shadowy" character, he says, permeates through Wuthering Heights. Maugham writes, "Emily Bronte disliked men and without exception was not even ordinarily polite to her father's curates."
She kept to herself and avoided people. That explains why she chooses Mrs Dean to be the narrator of Wutherings Heights. Says Maugham, "I think it would have shocked her harsh, uncompromising virtue to tell the outrageous story as a creation of her own. This technique of having the housekeeper tell the story enables her to hide herself behind, as it were a double mask.”
Leo Tolstoy he describes as "irritable, contradictory and arrogantly indifferent to other people's feelings" even though to Maugham there can never be a greater novel than War And Peace.
He describes French writer Stendhal's pompous manners and utter desperation to appeal to the fairer sex. “His passions were cerebral and to possess a woman was chiefly a satisfaction to his vanity"
Many authors such as Gustav Flaubert and Balzac had tangled love lives and Maugham recounts these without the slightest hesitation. They appear as complex characters shaped by money and emotional turmoil. He does linger on their personal lives a bit too much, which can distract the reader but his keen observations on their works remain the book’s true strength.
Like what he says of Henry Fielding, who started out as a playwright before turning to fiction. According to Maugham, this was a great advantage because "by then the author has learnt to be brief, he has learnt the value of rapid incident"
He has interesting things to say about Jane Austen as well, whose Pride And Prejudice he regards as a greatly entertaining and charming novel. Austen, he says, was the most consistent among her contemporaries. "Most novelists have their ups and downs. Miss Austen is the only exception I know to prove the rule that only the mediocre maintain an equal level. She is never more than a little below her best"
He may take from one hand what he gives her from the other yet his admiration for Austen is genuine. He writes, "Her observation was searching and her sentiment edifying, but it was her humour that gave point to her observation and a prim liveliness to her sentiment. Her range was narrow. She wrote very much the same story in all her books. Her experience of life was confined to a small circle of provincial society and that is what she was content to deal with. She wrote only of what she knew. She never tried to reproduce a conversation of men when by themselves, which in the nature of things, she could never have heard."
Among all the authors, he calls Balzac 'an absolute genius'
"His greatness lies not in a single work, but in the formidable mass of his production he was able to give a vivid and exciting impression of the multifariousness of life, its cross-purposes and confusions. I believe he was the first novelist to dwell on the paramount importance of economics in everybody's life. He would not have thought it enough to say that money is the root of all evil; he thought the desire for money, the appetite for money, was the mainspring of human action." Yet, his criticism of Balzac is that "he never learned the art of saying only what has to be said and not what needn't be said."
Maugham doesn't give a very flattering account of Stendhal's life and says that his works were almost destined to remain under oblivion. However, by a stroke of rare luck, certain intellectuals discovered merit in his writings and they spread the word around. Fortunately, these men became famous enough for their word to be taken seriously. In that respect Stendhal is that rare writer who was rescued from obscurity in which he languished during his lifetime. Maugham praises Stendhal's book, Le Rouge Et Le Noir for his psychological acuteness, his shrewd analysis of motives and the freshness and originality of his opinions.
When speaking of Moby Dick and Melville he notes how often the novel is treated as an allegory. “Allegories are awkward animals to handle. You can take them by their head or by the tail and it seems to me that an interpretation quite contrary is plausible.”
In the final chapter, Maugham observes that none of the writers who created these unforgettable works were particularly intellectual. Their greatness, he believes, came from their distinctive personalities and their emotional instincts.
Maugham’s most emphatically stated point in the book is that the novelists’ chief job is to entertain. That is his foremost duty to his reader, he says.
It would be impossible to talk about everything that is part of the book, but suffice it to say that Maugham's Ten Novels And Their Authors is studded with such illuminating commentary, so as to make this literary criticism of the highest order.
-Sandhya Iyer
