The W. Somerset Maugham Appreciation Society

and my favourite short story

A little post, dashed off because I was thinking yesterday evening about Somerset Maugham… He features in the most recent (typically brilliant) post by

What to read if

, which I restacked, asking the question: is he due a revival? Turns out that he is, unsurprisingly, appreciated within my lovely discerning corner of Substack. His writing is elegant, not overwhelmingly stylish but pleasurably so, and characterized (to my mind) by astuteness… As a writer he knows what ‘works’. And he knows of what he writes: he knows human nature. This is the simple quality that I find lacking in a lot of contemporary fiction, which too often feels fundamentally solipsistic, interested in itself rather than in what it is writing about, vaguely but boringly politicized (by which I mean that everything is sieved through certain orthodoxies, which novels are surely supposed to challenge), submerged in a thin suffocating mist of Creative Writing precepts…

I digress. I am apparently incapable of writing novels (most vexing) so have no right to criticize anybody who does. All I would say is that a writer such as Maugham, who knows what he is doing and gets on with it, is a beautiful clear-as-glass corrective to an overload of well-intentioned modern me me me.

He is, I suppose, what my beloved Agatha called herself: a craftsperson. ‘I feel it’s one up to the Low Brows!!!’ she wrote to her agent when she was given a CBE, I suspect not quite meaning it. but at the same time rather revelling in the epithet - the implication within it that readers actually enjoyed what she produced, rather than facing up to it in a spirit of counting-the-pages duty. Meanwhile Maugham, who merrily outsold his grand modernist near-contemporaries (he was born in 1874) and lived to the age of ninety-one in great comfort on the Cote d’Azur, wrote of himself:

I have no illusions about my literary position…. when clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering me. I do not resent it. It is very natural.

I was introduced to him by my mother, who adores him, and in fact have only read a couple of his novels (including the 1937 work Theatre - he also wrote plays, so knew that world very well - which became an entertaining film called Being Julia: Maugham is MADE for adaptation. To me that is a good sign). But what I love very much indeed are his short stories. His astute quality is supremely suited to that form. And indeed I love the form, the requisite shapeliness of it. Most of my favourite novelists are remarkably brilliant short story writers: Elizabeth Taylor (‘A Responsibility’ is the one that sticks with me, but there are many); Muriel Spark (‘The Black Madonna’, ‘The Portobello Road’); Jean Rhys (‘Till September, Petronella’); D.H. Lawrence (‘The Captain’s Doll’, ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’… the beyond-magnificent ‘St Mawr’ is I suppose a novella); even Agatha Christie (the twelve stories in The Labours of Hercules). I feel that this ability to distil is significant, that it implies something about their understanding of the novelist’s art, that it must always be illuminated…

Of course I am missing out Joyce and Woolf and de Maupassant and… one could go on.

But for sheer straightforward delicious enjoyment, my favourite short story of them all is ‘The Three Fat Women of Antibes’ (1933) by Somerset Maugham.

The construction of this twinkling little jewel is very simple, and immaculate. The women - Miss ‘Frank’ Hickson, Mrs Beatrice Richman, and the younger ‘Arrow’ Sutcliffe, who are all overweight to varying degrees - take a house together in the south of France, rather like an ad hoc health farm, where they will lose weight in a mutually supportive environment. Do lots of swimming and stick to a ‘cure’, a terrible diet supplied to them by a doctor from Carlsbad. It is a struggle, but the women are as one in their mission and, accordingly, great friends.

The plan worked very well. They had a grand time. Two days a week they ate nothing but hard-boiled eggs and raw tomatoes and they mounted the scales every morning with light hearts. Arrow got down to eleven stone and felt just like a girl; Beatrice and Frank by standing in a certain way just avoided the thirteen.

However: three is a tricky number, if one wishes to take one’s mind off food by playing cards of an evening. And so Frank invites her cousin, Lena Finch, to stay with them and make up a bridge four.

And Lena, as it happens, is one of those people who can eat whatever they want without putting on weight.

… presently they strolled back to the villa for luncheon.

In each napkin were two little anti-fat rusks. Lena gave a bright smile as she put them by the side of her plate.

‘May I have some bread?’ she asked.

The grossest indecency would not have fallen on the ears of those women with such a shock. Not one of them had eaten bread for ten years…

The butler brought a long crisp roll of French bread. Lena slit it in two and plastered it with the butter that was miraculously produced. A grilled sole was served.

‘We eat very simply here’, said Frank. ‘I hope you won’t mind.’

‘Oh no. I like my food very plain’, said Lena, as she took the butter and spread it over her fish…

The three friends exchanged a glance. Frank’s great sallow face sagged a little….

And from there on, from this great unwitting shove given to the three ladies’ teetering sense of self-control, a very courteous kind of carnage ensues.

It occurs to me now that this story is probably an example of wrong-think in that it is not exactly body-positive. Except, in a way, it is.

As you will see if you read it in its glorious elegant entirety. Which I do recommend. Here’s to craftspeople!