Author Description

Excerpts from a review by H. L. Mencken published in The Smart Set [Sept. 1919]: "THIS Maugham, half a dozen years ago, was well-known as a writer of bad comedies of the lighter, smarter variety, by Oscar Wilde out of the Tom Robertson tradition-the sort of thing that John Drew used to do- labored epigrams strung upon a thread of drawing-room adultery. In the intervals between them he wrote third-rate novels: "The Explorers," "The Magician," and others, all now forgotten. One day, entirely without warning, he gave London a surprise by publishing a story of a quite different kind, to wit, "Of Human Bondage," an interminably long, solemn and inchoate but nevertheless curiously sagacious and fascinating composition-very unEnglish in its general structure, almost Russian in some of its details. This book came to me for review, but when I observed its count of pages I quietly dropped it behind the piano........"Now, in "The Moon and Sixpence," Maugham takes leap forward. That leap is from the uncertainty of the neophyte to the sureness of the accomplished craftsman, from unsteady experimentation to fluent and easy technique. It is, indeed, an astonishing progress; I know of no other case that quite parallels it. The book, if it were hollow as a jug otherwise, would still be remarkable as a sheer piece of writing. It has good design; it moves and breathes; it has a fine manner; it is packed with artful and effective phrases. But better than all this, it is a book which tackles head-on one of the hardest problems that the practical novelist ever has to deal with, and which solves it in a way that is both sure-handed and brilliant. This is the problem of putting a man of genius into a story in such fashion that he will seem real-in such fashion that the miracle of him will not blow up the plausibility of him. Scores of novelists have tried to solve it, and failed. Every publishing season sees half a dozen new tales with Nietzsche, or Chopin, or Bo