Rapid responses are electronic comments to the editor. They enable our users
to debate issues raised in articles published on bmj.com. A rapid response
is first posted online. If you need the URL (web address) of an individual
response, simply click on the response headline and copy the URL from the
browser window. A proportion of responses will, after editing, be published
online and in the print journal as letters, which are indexed in PubMed.
Rapid responses are not indexed in PubMed and they are not journal articles.
The BMJ reserves the right to remove responses which are being
wilfully misrepresented as published articles or when it is brought to our
attention that a response spreads misinformation.
From March 2022, the word limit for rapid responses will be 600 words not
including references and author details. We will no longer post responses
that exceed this limit.
The word limit for letters selected from posted responses remains 300 words.
Journalists from America were never sure how to pronounce his name. With a coffee-laced drawl they called him “Mister Moggam.” However the correct and rather nuanced pronunciation was “Mawum.” They would travel to interview the most recognisable author in the world at his villa in the south of France and would be taken aback by his stammer. The speech impediment was ascribed to his mother’s death when he was eight. Later, still at the formative age of ten, he lost his father. It had been a terrible start. With such an introduction to life, there was always the potential for these injuries to produce a misshapen adult. But Somerset Maugham went beyond merely surviving the barbarities of his childhood. Till his last days in 1965 he kept a photo of his mother by his bedside, accepting her as the only one who had authentically loved him.
Maugham has a niche in British literature which lends itself to waves of repeat analysis although in his day he was lambasted by litterateurs for books that were said to be solely propelled by plot and dialogue. University academics and critics felt he had no substance and spitefully begrudged his success. His short stories and novels were either met with flagrant scorn or a smattering of miserly reviews. Literary circles instead championed experimentalists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. These monastic writers were trawling through the peculiarities of the mind and fathoming these depths through a new narrative technique called stream-of-consciousness. Maugham meanwhile was content with his choice of linear and unornamented storytelling.
Studied in a later historical period, one can see how the disparagements of past literary critics were themselves poor performances because when reading a book such as “The Moon and Sixpence” (1919) one undeniably meets the acute intelligence of Somerset Maugham. His stories are not vapid, unthinking entertainments as originally claimed. It can also be suggested that he rather limited himself by writing conventional novels, plays and short stories. Had he elected to do so, he could, believably, have turned to “serious literature” though even in the final totality of his work there are curious finds such as “The Razor’s Edge” (1944), a fiction which shows his exposition of a recondite subject such as Eastern mysticism.
Maugham was born a true Victorian in 1874 but lived until 1965, a span of ninety years into a time when spacemen were skimming along on the moon. Under the climate of Victorian literature, he grew as a writer rather more differently than one may have expected. He had none of the Victorian inertia and convolutedness. His writing had the lightness of bearing which defines the racy prose of the twentieth century. Effectively, Maugham as a writer was modern long before the modern writing style reached a point of steady state. Hence it is no surprise to find that bastions of plain prose, such as George Orwell, cited Somerset Maugham as their immediate antecedent. But his most effusive admirer was Ian Fleming, the writer of the Bond books, who would sit his wife in a 2.5-litre Riley and motor hastily down to the sea-sighing south of France. The Riley would burble through the olive-treed gates up to the Villa Mauresque and Fleming would dine with the patriarch of British literature in a house with Renoirs in the shade of the sundrenched walls. There was a decades-wide gap between the two writers but Fleming’s wife over the candles on the dinner table saw much similarity between the two conversing personalities. Local vineyards yielded a bottle of wine and the cuisine would invariably be Continental for Maugham had long concluded that “To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.” Born in Paris to British expatriates, Maugham had always felt at home in the country of his birth and in France he was also at ease with his homosexuality, a characteristic which was repugnant to the common mindset in Britain.
Somerset Maugham read medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital in London and qualified as a doctor in 1897. He was never to practise medicine but maintained that the years at St Thomas’s furnished him with enough experience to study human beings more closely in his second incarnation as writer. His first novel was “Liza of Lambeth,” precociously published at twenty-three, its sentences stitched together with a fountain pen under lamplight after his perambulations on the wards during the day. It was a book on social conditions in Lambeth, an area of London which in those days was the equivalent of a modern ghetto. Liza is the eighteen-year-old protagonist, a working-class girl who lives with her alcoholic mother and several siblings down a side street in Lambeth. She works in a factory. Liza becomes entangled with a married man and capriciously tries to end their clandestine relationship. As relations become muddied, Liza falls pregnant and one evening when returning home from work she is vengefully attacked by Jim’s wife. Beaten in the street to the electric delight of onlookers, Liza staggers home to her alcoholic mother and starts to drink that evening after the hideous mauling in public. The traumatised girl has a miscarriage and dies the following evening. The closing passage reads:
“The doctor opened one of Liza’s eyes and touched it, then he laid on her breast the hand he had been holding, and drew the sheet over her head. Jim turned away with a look of intense weariness on his face, and the two women began weeping silently. The darkness was sinking before the day, and a dim, grey light came through the window. The lamp spluttered out.”
As a novel, “Liza of Lambeth” demands close reading because a young Maugham tried to reproduce the Cockney dialect of London in print, an effort which shows the limitations of literature. Historically, it is a museum work insofar as containing the experience of a medical student from the last years of the 1800s in London. Many themes of industrialised society in this 1897 book are identifiable in 2014 : the drudgery of factory work, alcoholic dissipation, teenage pregnancy, and the cruelties of urban subculture. It is a book by a young man of twenty-two who was no ordinary student. Maugham kept his name on the medical register till his death even though he abandoned medicine after qualification for a life which he knew was more suited to his highly developed sensibilities.
Competing interests:
No competing interests
23 June 2014
Jagdeep Singh Gandhi
Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon
Worcester Royal Eye Unit
Worcestershire Royal Hospital, Worcester, UNITED KINGDOM
Re: The total institution of Somerset Maugham
Journalists from America were never sure how to pronounce his name. With a coffee-laced drawl they called him “Mister Moggam.” However the correct and rather nuanced pronunciation was “Mawum.” They would travel to interview the most recognisable author in the world at his villa in the south of France and would be taken aback by his stammer. The speech impediment was ascribed to his mother’s death when he was eight. Later, still at the formative age of ten, he lost his father. It had been a terrible start. With such an introduction to life, there was always the potential for these injuries to produce a misshapen adult. But Somerset Maugham went beyond merely surviving the barbarities of his childhood. Till his last days in 1965 he kept a photo of his mother by his bedside, accepting her as the only one who had authentically loved him.
Maugham has a niche in British literature which lends itself to waves of repeat analysis although in his day he was lambasted by litterateurs for books that were said to be solely propelled by plot and dialogue. University academics and critics felt he had no substance and spitefully begrudged his success. His short stories and novels were either met with flagrant scorn or a smattering of miserly reviews. Literary circles instead championed experimentalists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. These monastic writers were trawling through the peculiarities of the mind and fathoming these depths through a new narrative technique called stream-of-consciousness. Maugham meanwhile was content with his choice of linear and unornamented storytelling.
Studied in a later historical period, one can see how the disparagements of past literary critics were themselves poor performances because when reading a book such as “The Moon and Sixpence” (1919) one undeniably meets the acute intelligence of Somerset Maugham. His stories are not vapid, unthinking entertainments as originally claimed. It can also be suggested that he rather limited himself by writing conventional novels, plays and short stories. Had he elected to do so, he could, believably, have turned to “serious literature” though even in the final totality of his work there are curious finds such as “The Razor’s Edge” (1944), a fiction which shows his exposition of a recondite subject such as Eastern mysticism.
Maugham was born a true Victorian in 1874 but lived until 1965, a span of ninety years into a time when spacemen were skimming along on the moon. Under the climate of Victorian literature, he grew as a writer rather more differently than one may have expected. He had none of the Victorian inertia and convolutedness. His writing had the lightness of bearing which defines the racy prose of the twentieth century. Effectively, Maugham as a writer was modern long before the modern writing style reached a point of steady state. Hence it is no surprise to find that bastions of plain prose, such as George Orwell, cited Somerset Maugham as their immediate antecedent. But his most effusive admirer was Ian Fleming, the writer of the Bond books, who would sit his wife in a 2.5-litre Riley and motor hastily down to the sea-sighing south of France. The Riley would burble through the olive-treed gates up to the Villa Mauresque and Fleming would dine with the patriarch of British literature in a house with Renoirs in the shade of the sundrenched walls. There was a decades-wide gap between the two writers but Fleming’s wife over the candles on the dinner table saw much similarity between the two conversing personalities. Local vineyards yielded a bottle of wine and the cuisine would invariably be Continental for Maugham had long concluded that “To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.” Born in Paris to British expatriates, Maugham had always felt at home in the country of his birth and in France he was also at ease with his homosexuality, a characteristic which was repugnant to the common mindset in Britain.
Somerset Maugham read medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital in London and qualified as a doctor in 1897. He was never to practise medicine but maintained that the years at St Thomas’s furnished him with enough experience to study human beings more closely in his second incarnation as writer. His first novel was “Liza of Lambeth,” precociously published at twenty-three, its sentences stitched together with a fountain pen under lamplight after his perambulations on the wards during the day. It was a book on social conditions in Lambeth, an area of London which in those days was the equivalent of a modern ghetto. Liza is the eighteen-year-old protagonist, a working-class girl who lives with her alcoholic mother and several siblings down a side street in Lambeth. She works in a factory. Liza becomes entangled with a married man and capriciously tries to end their clandestine relationship. As relations become muddied, Liza falls pregnant and one evening when returning home from work she is vengefully attacked by Jim’s wife. Beaten in the street to the electric delight of onlookers, Liza staggers home to her alcoholic mother and starts to drink that evening after the hideous mauling in public. The traumatised girl has a miscarriage and dies the following evening. The closing passage reads:
“The doctor opened one of Liza’s eyes and touched it, then he laid on her breast the hand he had been holding, and drew the sheet over her head. Jim turned away with a look of intense weariness on his face, and the two women began weeping silently. The darkness was sinking before the day, and a dim, grey light came through the window. The lamp spluttered out.”
As a novel, “Liza of Lambeth” demands close reading because a young Maugham tried to reproduce the Cockney dialect of London in print, an effort which shows the limitations of literature. Historically, it is a museum work insofar as containing the experience of a medical student from the last years of the 1800s in London. Many themes of industrialised society in this 1897 book are identifiable in 2014 : the drudgery of factory work, alcoholic dissipation, teenage pregnancy, and the cruelties of urban subculture. It is a book by a young man of twenty-two who was no ordinary student. Maugham kept his name on the medical register till his death even though he abandoned medicine after qualification for a life which he knew was more suited to his highly developed sensibilities.
Competing interests: No competing interests