William Somerset Maugham, CH (January 25, 1874 – December 16, 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He was one of the most popular authors achieving recognition as the highest paid of his profession during the 1930s.
Commercial success with high book sales, successful play productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. Small and weak as a boy, Maugham had been proud even then of his stamina, and as an adult he kept churning out the books, proud that he could.
Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality", his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work.
It seems equally likely that Maugham was underrated because he wrote in such a direct style. There was nothing in a book by Maugham that the reading public needed explained to them by critics. Maugham thought clearly, wrote lucidly, and expressed acerbic and sometimes cynical opinions in handsome, civilized prose. He wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and won critical acclaim. In this context, his writing was criticized as "such a tissue of clichés that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way"[16].
Maugham's homosexual leanings also shaped his fiction, in two ways. Since, in life, he tended to see attractive women as sexual rivals, he often gave the women of his fiction sexual needs and appetites, in a way quite unusual for distinguished authors of his time. "Liza of Lambeth," "Cakes and Ale" and "The Razor's Edge" all featured women determined to service their strong sexual appetites, heedless of the result.
Also, the fact that Maugham's own sexual appetites were highly disapproved of, or even criminal, in nearly all of the countries in which he traveled, made Maugham unusually tolerant of the vices of others. Readers and critics often complained that Maugham did not clearly enough condemn what was bad in the villains of his fiction and plays. Maugham replied in 1938: "It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me."
Maugham's public account of his abilities remained modest; toward the end of his career he described himself as "in the very first row of the second-raters". In 1954, he was made a Companion of Honour.
Maugham had begun collecting theatrical paintings before the First World War and continued to the point where his collection was second only to that of the Garrick Club[17]. In 1948 he announced that he would bequeath this collection to the Trustees of the National Theatre, and from 1951, some 14 years before his death, it began its exhibition life and in 1994 they were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden.
Shallow, poorly educated Kitty marries the passionate and intellectual Walter Fane and has an affair with a career politician, Charles Townsend, assistant colonial secretary of Hong Kong. When Walter discovers the relationship, he compels Kitty to accompany him to a cholera-infested region of mainland China, where she finds limited happiness working with children at a convent. But when Walter dies, she is forced to leave China and return to England. Generally abandoned, she grasps desperately for the affection of her one remaining relative, her long-ignored father. In the end, in sharp, unexamined contrast to her own behavior patterns, she asserts that her unborn daughter will grow up to be an independent woman. The Painted Veil was first published in 1925 and is usually described as a strong story about a woman's spiritual journey. To more pragmatic, modern eyes, Kitty's emotional growth appears minimal. Still, if not a major feminist work, the book has literary interest. Sophie Ward's uninflected reading is competent if not compelling.
没想到,瓦尔特最后说的一句话的竟然是“最后死的却是狗”。《挽歌》中的一句诗,若是像凯蒂那样不知道这其中的典故,定会觉到莫名奇妙;一个男人的遗言怎会和狗相关?我一直在想,凯蒂知道了狗与主人的故事之后,心里会有什么样的感触。是在经历了波澜之后的真诚悔过,还...
评分如果说旅行对于写作者来说,是一次难得的机遇,那么这个机遇对于当时的毛姆来说,真的是一次修心之旅。是旅行让他见识了这个世界不同国家的地方,也让他找到了不同的灵感,写下了许多优秀作品。 在毛姆所在的年代,不论是当时的英国还是法国亦或者远在大洋彼岸的中国,都是混乱...
评分为什么说她走上了精神成长之路? 凯蒂真的揭开了人性面纱吗? 为什么我觉得毛姆的讽刺是针对小说中任何一个人物的呢?对他这么冷的犀利很佩服啊。 对话是一绝。 对情景的渲染是一绝。 置之度外的讽刺是一绝。 此外,也许人生就是一出戏剧。每个人带着面具演出才正常。 活在...
评分亲爱的瓦尔特: 我想你一定明白这个称呼 你也一定明白亲密的言语和行为从来都不代表真正的亲密 有时它只是一种礼貌,一种习惯。 亲爱的瓦尔特,那么你一定从开始就明白 我之所以嫁给你,是因为我当时是如此急迫的想要逃离那个令人窒息的家 势利的母亲,懦弱的父亲,无知的妹...
评分Maugham书里最不喜欢的一本
评分听外文书第二本 嗯反复了很多次 经典桥段到总是能第一次就捕捉到听清楚 练听力任重而道远啊
评分电影改动太大,毛姆知道了估计要跳脚。
评分a man's death in exchange for a woman's growth
评分毛姆的笔力之精湛 就在于着墨不多的人物也不平面化 几组对比与对照意象的设置非常工整 然则结尾新生活的曙光并不能照亮这个不快乐的故事啊
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