A Writer's Notebook (72 page)

My first book, published in 1897, was something of a success. Edmund Gosse admired it and praised it. After that I published other books and became a popular dramatist. I wrote
Of Human Bondage
and
The Moon and Sixpence
. I used to meet Gosse once or twice a year and continued to do so for twenty years, but I never met him without his saying to me in his unctuous way: “Oh, my dear Maugham, I liked your
Liza of Lambeth
so much. How wise you are never to have written anything else.”

The Dying Poet. He was so ill that the friend who was taking care of him felt he should telegraph for his wife. She was a painter of sorts and had gone to London for a one-man show she was giving in a minor gallery. When he told the sick man that he had sent for her, he was angry. “Why couldn't you let me die in peace,” he cried. Someone had sent him a basket of peaches. “The first thing she'll do on getting here is to take the best peach in the basket and while she eats it she'll talk of herself and the success she's had in London.”

The friend went to fetch her at the station and brought her to the apartment.

“Oh, Francesco, Francesco,” she cried, as she swept into the room. His name was Francis, but she always called him Francesco. “How terrible! Oh, what beautiful peaches. Who sent you them?” She chose one and dug her teeth into the juicy flesh. “The private view. Everyone was there that one's ever heard of. An enormous success. Everyone admired the pictures. I was surrounded with people. They all said I had real talent.”

She went on and on. At last the friend told her that it was late and she must let her husband go to sleep.

“I'm absolutely exhausted,” she cried. “Such a journey. I had to sit up all night. It was horrible.”

She went to the bedside to kiss the sick man. He turned his face away.

He was a shipping clerk. He went to work at fourteen and for twenty-two years worked in the same firm. At the age of twenty-eight he married a wife who after a year or two had an illness which left her a permanent invalid. He was a devoted husband. He began to steal the insurance stamps, not so much because he wanted the money, though it enabled him to get little delicacies for his wife, but because it amused him to think that he was not the respectable, reliable clerk his employers thought him. Then his thefts were discovered, and knowing that he would be discharged and perhaps sent to prison and there would be no one to look after his wife, he killed her. When she was dead he put a pillow under her head and an eiderdown over her body. Then he took her pet dog to a vet's to have it painlessly destroyed, for he couldn't bear to kill it himself. He went to a police station and gave himself up.

T. He was a tall man, thin without being cadaverous, and he walked with a slight stoop. I suppose he was between forty-five and fifty, for his curling hair, though abundant, was very grey, and his clean-shaven, neat face was much lined. It had little colour. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. He was unobtrusive. He spoke in a low voice, seldom unless he was spoken to, and though he never said an intelligent thing he never said a foolish one. He was a trusted man in one of the most important corporations in America, and it was his trustworthiness that chiefly attracted your attention. It was plain that he was not a very clever fellow, but certainly he was a very honest one. He was sober in his habits. He had a wife whom he was attached to and two children of whom he was agreeably proud. You could have safely wagered that he had never in his life done anything which he had reason to regret. He was satisfied with the firm he worked for, satisfied with his position in it, which was honourable without being conspicuous, satisfied with the house he lived in, the city he worked in and the train service that took him daily to his occupation. He was an extremely capable employee.
He was a rivet in a huge machine and was content to be a rivet. The great levers, the vast revolving wheels, the gigantic cylinders never suggested to him that it was possible to be anything but a rivet. He was a man extraordinary only in that he was ordinary to such a supreme degree.

It was at a house-party. The post had just come in. Her hostess gave her a letter and she recognised her lover's writing. She opened it and began to read it. Suddenly she was aware that her husband was standing behind her and reading the letter over her shoulder. She read to the end and then handed it to her hostess.

“He seems very much in love,” she said, “but if I were you I wouldn't let him write to you in that way.”

If you have a little more money than other people you must expect them to exploit you and sponge upon you; but it is exasperating that they should take you for such a fool that you don't know what they're about, and if they get away with it, it's only because you let them.

Ernest P. He was a young Frenchman, of good family, very brilliant and expected by his family to have a distinguished career. He was to go into the diplomatic service. At twenty he fell madly in love with a girl eight years older than himself; but she married a more suitable person. It broke him up. To the consternation of his family he threw up the studies which would enable him to pass the necessary examinations and took to social service in the slums of Paris. He became deeply religious (his family were free-thinkers) and immersed himself in the literature of mysticism. There were troubles in Morocco at the time, and he joined a dangerous expedition and was killed. All this had a shattering effect on the woman he loved, on his
mother and his friends. They were deeply disturbed. They felt that here among them had lived one in whom there was something of a saint. His sweetness, his goodness, his piety, his nobility of soul made them ashamed—and afraid.

I thought there was a moving story to be written on these bare facts, and I was interested in the influence the life and death of this poor boy had on those who had been in contact with him; but it was too difficult for me to cope with and I never wrote it
.

People will sometimes forgive you the good you have done them, but seldom the harm they have done you.