![]() ![]() There was no real sense of anything "retro" about him. His peers were writers such as Compton Mackenzie, Hugh Walpole, John Galsworthy – forgotten figures, almost – but something about Maugham and his work endured long into his dotage. He was writing his fourth novel in 1900, the last year of Victoria's reign (some three years before Waugh was born, as it happens) and so in a very real sense his sensibilities are Victorian rather than Edwardian. Maugham died aged 91 in 1965 – a few months before Evelyn Waugh – but he was born in 1874, the year Disraeli took over as prime minister from Gladstone. I cite this for two reasons: one to give a sense of Maugham's stature and reputation, even in the late 1960s, just a few years after his death and, two, as a tribute to his astonishing longevity. ![]() "There's no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like," is one sentence I underlined (among many). Ostensibly a distillation of his diary, kept over some 50 years, it was more interesting to the aspiring novelist for the gnomic advice Maugham offered on the craft of writing. I still possess my 1967 Penguin paperback of Somerset Maugham's A Writer's Notebook. ![]()
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