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.
毛姆叔叔,从来不在毒舌这件事上让人失望,有时候想到一个口吃者能刻薄到这种地步,仿佛在现实中就是滔滔不绝,一句俏皮话取乐满场人的社交高手,真是造物主的神奇。 看到他笔下的人物偶然错开眼神、貌似不经意提起的短句、陡然升起的语调,凡此种种,统统拿来一番剖析,血淋...
评分2016年4月12日凌晨1点19分,有好几件事情混杂在一起:①困 ②刚刚过去的××岁生日 ③毛姆的《面纱》昨天付梓印刷 ④这篇毫无头绪的文章。这些纷杂无序的事情同时出现在这一精确的时间点上,也许包含着某种隐喻。正如《面纱》开篇所说的:“那描画的面纱,芸芸众生称之...
评分 评分Good people all, of every sort, Give ear unto my song; And if you find it wondrous short, It cannot hold you long. In Islington there was a man Of whom the world might say, That still a godly race he ran— Whene'er he went to pray. A kind and gentle hear...
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...
a man's death in exchange for a woman's growth
评分a man's death in exchange for a woman's growth
评分电影改动太大,毛姆知道了估计要跳脚。
评分毛姆的小说读来总是有种很轻松的感觉。很复杂的故事却能让人读得很轻松。或许就是make the readers feel clever的典型?
评分结尾太平了吧 感觉像草草收尾 不爱的人永远无法爱上吗 本能的爱和精神的爱 没有前者 后者的力量竟会如此薄弱吗
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