Gods of Modern Grub Street: Impressions of Contemporary Authors

by Arthur St. John Adcock

I could name authors of our day who have dissipated their energies in half a dozen or more directions. They are journalists, novelists, poets, essayists, critics, dramatists, writers of books for children and editors of all manner of books. They have no settled reputation, the public does not know where to have them; they are all sorts of things to all sorts of readers and nothing in particular to any. They win some vague popularity, perhaps, and an income, but not fame. Fame comes to the man who concentrates on the one kind of work for which he has special gifts, puts all his heart and all his skill into the doing of that.

You may say that Somerset Maugham is versatile; but he has written no verse, no essays, no criticism, no tales for children. He wisely exercised his versatility within the range of a single art until he turned his attention to the stage, and if he has been versatile since, it has been only inside the limits of these two arts, a versatility as legitimate in the artist as it is sagacious in the man who has to earn a livelihood with his pen and hopes to go on pleasing his audience with many books. For there is no virtue in the opposite extreme to which some novelists go nowadays, who concentrate so conscientiously that they narrow their outlook to one phase of life, one type of character, and never shift their scenery. By this means they ensure that their stories are graphically accurate, meticulously true, but by the time they have told four or five the reader becomes aware of a sameness, a monotony in them, pines for a change, goes after new gods, and the old shrine begins to lack worshippers. If Maugham’s circulation ever dwindles it will not be for this reason.

Happily he has a sense of humor which prevents him from adopting anything in the nature of a pose; but, however unassuming, he is not diffident; he is without affectations, and assured me once he was without ideals, by which I believe he meant no more than that he was not too idealistic to be a practical man. It was when he had succeeded as a novelist and was starting on his successful career as a dramatist that he told me he felt there was a tremendous amount of nonsense talked about the serious drama. “All this high falutin chatter about ideals!” said he. “A playwright’s and a missionary’s calling appear to me to be two distinct and quite separate callings which should not be permitted to overlap. I cannot understand why a serious play should be held to be pre-eminently greater or more important than a humorous play, a comedy, for instance. Nor do I admit for a moment that the former is more difficult to write or demands a consideration peculiar to itself.” Briefly, he protested that his one aim as novelist or dramatist was to amuse; he thought that was the first business of all authors, adding, “I would excuse almost anything but dullness.” No book fails because its literary quality is too high, but because the writer who can write literature does not always know how to write it interestingly. And I found that Maugham, in the broad sanity of his judgment, had no sympathy with the egotistical talk of unpopular but superior persons who ascribe their failure to a fine inability, a noble disinclination to “write down” to the presumably lower apprehensions of the vast majority of mankind.

His practice, through the many years since he emerged as a new author, has always squared with his precepts. Somebody writing of him a little while ago said he got his intimate knowledge of men and women, particularly of the London poor, while he was working as a doctor, but this is scarcely accurate. After completing his education at King’s School, Canterbury, and Heidelberg University, he became a student at St. Thomas’s Hospital, and in due course took his M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P. degrees, but he never put up his brass plate and worked as a doctor. He had never seriously intended doing so. His family wished him to study medicine, and he yielded to that wish, but his own ambition from the first had been to write for the stage. He was convinced that stage-craft was a knack he could acquire if he made up his mind to it; but he had a saving leaven of common sense and had seen enough of things to know that it was infinitely harder to worry through all the difficulties between writing a play and getting it produced than to find a publisher for a novel, so he resolved to turn novelist as a means of earning bread and butter and winning a large enough reputation to move theater managers to feel that it was at least worth their while to look at his dramas.

That was in the 90’s—the glamorous 1890’s when some would persuade us the whole world of letters in this country was dominated by Oscar Wilde and his circle. But Maugham was one of the many authors of the period—I have referred to others already—whose work shows little trace of that influence. There is nothing much of romance in the story of his literary beginnings; he did not cast himself upon the town and drudge in the byways of journalism, nor did he undergo the disheartening experience of having his manuscripts persistently rejected by the magazines. While he was still a student at St. Thomas’ he sent Fisher Unwin a collection of stories that eventually appeared under the title of “Orientations,” and that astute publisher at once accepted it, but strongly advised Maugham that it would be much better for himself that he should make a start with a novel; and he accepted the advice and went away to act upon it.

Just then the slum story was all in the air—so much so that “slumming” had become a popular pastime with young ladies of leisure. The vogue of Gissing was at its height; Arthur Morrison had written in “Tales of Mean Streets” and “The Child of the Jago” some of the most powerfully realistic of any pictures of London low life; Edwin Pugh had revealed the same underworld in “A Street in Suburbia” and “The Man of Straw”; Pett Ridge’s “Mord Em’ly,” showing something of the happier side of that drab underworld, was running serially, and various other writers were finding themes for fiction in those ugly facts of existence that the city keeps as much out of sight as possible. In any case, the slums of Lambeth lay beside St. Thomas’s Hospital, their inhabitants came into it as patients, so Somerset Maugham knew them, their homes, their habits, their manner of speech, their manner of living, and fashioned his first novel out of such personal experience. He called it “A Lambeth Idyll”; Fisher Unwin accepted it and, in 1897, published it as “Liza of Lambeth.” Its stark, violent realism roused a good deal of protest; we were not so tolerant in such matters then as we have now become; and though there were not wanting those who praised the stern faithfulness with which it depicted certain phases of London life, more and louder voices denounced it as unpleasant, brutal, repellant, extravagantly squalid. Crude and raw it may have been, somewhat obviously out to shock the delicate, omitting too much light and massing too much shadow, but there was truth if not all the truth in it, Liza and her mother and her barbaric lover, Jim, were alive and real, and the controversy that raged round the book served, at least, the good purpose of obtaining for it a measure of the success it merited.

But if any imagined that, like so many of his contemporaries, Maugham was going to devote himself to the exploitation of the slums, or of low life, they soon found they were mistaken. He finished with the slums in “Liza of Lambeth” and never wrote another novel about them. He moved through average society in “The Making of a Saint” (1898); then his actual first book, the short stories “Orientations,” made its appearance; on the heels of this followed “The Hero”; then came what I still feel to be the strongest and ablest of his novels—“Mrs. Craddock.” Good as it is, the times were not ripe for such frank handling of sex mysteries and the book was rejected by every publisher of consequence. Even Heinmann declined it at first; then, on a second consideration, accepted it and published it in 1903. The study of that elemental, passionate, intensely female creature, Mrs. Craddock, is an aggressively candid, extraordinarily subtle essay in feminine psychology; her story is touched with satire and irony and inevitably clouded with tragedy, wherefore the general reader, who prefers pleasanter things, did not take to it kindly. Maugham has never since, perhaps, been so somber, though the sex element has continued to play a potent part in most of his novels and stories, which have had their scenes in middle-class and high society, at home, at the North Pole, in the South Seas and, with those wonderful sketches of character, “On a Chinese Screen,” in China.

Meanwhile, as everybody knows, his triumphant progress as a novelist had not diverted Somerset Maugham from his original bent. In 1902 he had a one-act piece, “Schiffbrüchig,” produced in Germany. Next year he wrote “The Man of Honor” for the Stage Society, but instead of attracting theatrical managers to him it frightened them off, for there was no laughter in it, and they appear to have taken for granted that it fully represented what he could do and meant to do, and that consequently nothing of his was likely to appeal to the playgoing public or could be made to pay.

But they reckoned without their host. Maugham set to work and wrote three comedies, “Lady Frederick,” “Jack Straw” and “Dot,” which were destined to establish him as a dramatist whose plays had money in them.

His later plays have not gone begging for producers—producers have gone begging for them. And the plays of Maugham have been as varied in theme and manner as his novels. From gay, witty, frivolous, ironic comedy, he has passed to sentimental or romantic drama; but he has learned to touch in his realism more deftly, more cunningly, and is no longer faced with the task of having to placate a public obsessed by the mid-Victorian gospel that the plain truth about men and women is not respectable and must not be told.