Maugham’s the Word

A fellow scribe said that it was as necessary for a writer to have mastered the Maugham short story as it was for an artist to have mastered the art of drawing.

At a male-only lunch high up in the Alps the subject of AI came up. We were five friends, and four of them were in favor. “But it will kill good writing,” said yours truly. The rest agreed. Info will trump grace, was the conclusion. Some time ago a friend had AI imitate my column and she played it back to me. I listened carefully. It was a good imitation of probably the worst writing I have ever done, clumsy, obvious, and phony. I recounted the story to my friends at lunch. “So what else is new about your bad writing?” said one of my oldest friends.

Joking aside, no one reads any longer. When was the last time someone asked you what book you are reading. “What are you watching?” is what people ask nowadays. The devil screen is the enemy, and political correctness comes in a close second. Modern novels and books in general are about a lived experience, and we all know how boring a lived experience can be. Especially when it’s written by a neurotic female American, a drug-addicted, in-the-closet British chap, or a one-legged black South American lesbian. No wonder so many so-called intelligent people now watch cartoons nonstop.

Yep, books have gone with the wind, and please excuse the corn, but at my advanced age I find too many people very light on the stuff between the ears. Here’s Papa Hemingway on writing: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. When writing, a writer should create living people, not characters.” If only the nauseating narcissism of today’s writers would follow such advice, I might buy a novel or two, something I haven’t done in decades.

Papa got the Nobel in 1954, and he damn well deserved it because he did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the 20th century. Papa wrestled over a sentence, even a word, for hours on end. His travails were put in writing to his editor Maxwell Perkins. Let’s face it: Getting it just right is very hard work, as one goes over yesterday’s sentences and spends a whole morning making corrections. What today’s bums have done is they’ve made writing easy by what they call stream of consciousness. It is a con, writing down everything that comes to mind and forgetting all about rhythm, euphony, and grace. All good writers write by instinct, but style counts a lot. As a young boy I remember well the narrow streets of Athens lined with whitewashed houses underneath the Acropolis, the smell of jasmine and the tap-tap of donkeys’ hooves on the cobbled paving, the trickle of the fountains, and the occasional cry of beggars. One needs to observe before one writes, and also to explore. These present-day untalented ones just let it spew out, as if their anger and despair make them interesting.

The hackneyed phrases one used to describe first loves were normal, and the reason Holden Caulfield remains immortal is because the writer keeps him young and innocent. The trick to good writing is, of course, to omit needless words. Good style is direct, conversational, unfussy, and definitely unpretentious. I’ve always considered Somerset Maugham the best of all Brit writers, and he should have been awarded a Nobel Prize that has gone to far, far lesser writers.

Willie Maugham’s short stories are better than anyone else’s, and that includes Guy de Maupassant and Irwin Shaw. The deceptive simplicity of his method of writing concealed a well-honed technique, and those who attempted to copy it failed and failed miserably. A fellow scribe said that it was as necessary for a writer to have mastered the Maugham short story as it was for an artist to have mastered the art of drawing. Unlike these shortcut phonies of today, Willie Maugham plotted his stories with deadly precision, twisted the tail of stories, and had unexpected denouements. His understated style, coupled with careful withholding of information, kept the reader in a state of pleasurable suspense.

Yep, those were the days, and those were real writers. Irwin Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” and “The Eighty-Yard Run” were as good as it gets, as were Maugham’s “The Human Element” and “Alien Corn.” Willie subtly wrote about anti-Semitism long before WWII and did it in a way that touched one’s heart because it was subtly done and not bashed down one’s throat. I was a friend of Irwin Shaw’s and often asked him about Maugham. “He’s the master, no one can touch him,” Irwin, a master himself, would say.

I became a nonfiction reader because of the preaching in today’s fiction, as well as the moral vacuity and many other flaws. But books on history kept me going, and as Harpo Marx did not exactly say, “If you’ve read one history book, you’ve read them all.” The irony is that Harpo became friends with Willie, the latter greatly surprised at Harpo’s literary knowledge and erudition—don’t forget, he never spoke in his films—and then even more surprised when told by a witness that the only book in Harpo’s empty library was Willie’s <em>Of Human Bondage</em>.