The Maugham's Collection

Before I got on the plane to England, I thought I should put a novel in my luggage, and when I looked through my bookshelf, I saw a collection of Maugham's short stories and thought, "This is him. I was going to England, and it was the right time to read the work of a British novelist. And it was a collection of short stories, ready to be picked up and put down, just right for a traveler.

It proved to be the right choice. These days, on the sofa in the eerily solemn chapel-like rooms of Trinity College, in the top bunk bed of a London youth hostel, in a small roadside café, and on a return flight, Maugham was my only travel companion.

Some of the names of places I had just met in London appeared repeatedly in his novels. Charing Cross, Picadilly Circus, Bond Street ......, all completely unfamiliar names, had an intimacy because of my reading of Maugham. What's more, it's easy to visit a city's places of interest, but not so easy to understand its temperament. Reading Maugham's novels is a kind of a sheep's-eye path into the city. His old London, prosperous, vain and sentimental, is a belated beauty.

The greatest feeling Maugham gave me was warmth. Unlike the distinctive "experimental style" of many novelists of the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th century, his language is very plain, homely, and even a bit nagging. Reading his novels is very much like drinking tea with an ordinary old man, listening to him talk about his own trivialities while drinking.

This is also the reason why many critics regard him as a "second-rate writer". In his novels, there are too few skillful and innovative things. But for me, this is precisely what makes him so lovely. I can't read the "masters" like Ulysses, Proust and Kafka, and I don't want to be enlightened. I always feel that in those "experimental" novels, the author's self-consciousness is too strong, and he always stretches out a hand from the text, waving a flag with two big words on it - "individuality". ", rather than reading a story, we should be watching a performance art.

Maugham is different; he hides in the depths of the story, content with the role of an immovable narrator, never letting his voice or tone steal the thunder of the story itself. I think he may not have been an ambitious novelist, just happy to share some "escapades", his purpose of writing, not a place in literary history, but a sigh of relief from his friend who was drinking tea opposite him.

Maugham spent his life traveling around the world, experiencing two world wars, and his spatial wanderings and the changes of the times predestined him to be surrounded by people who were "a mine of stories". In this thick collection of novels, he writes about the encounters of English gentlemen and merchants in the declining colonies. A girl who falls in love with her brother, a middle-aged woman dumped by her young lover, an aristocratic boy who dreams of becoming a pianist, a colonial merchant who commits suicide by drinking ...... often ends with someone's death, but death in his writing is so careless that it seems no more weighty than the fall of a leaf. There is no doubt that, like many good writers, compassion is a fundamental emotion in his writing, but also like many good writers, he is able to conceal it without revealing it, seemingly indifferently.

For me, what makes his novels extraordinarily dear to me are the "people without a homeland" in his writing. He writes about the vulnerability of a person in a foreign culture, and the equally strong sense of disconnection when returning from a foreign land to one's homeland. The sense of homelessness takes on a double meaning due to the displacement of space and the vicissitudes of the times.

Today, I couldn't help but Google Mao Mao, and found that he grew up as an orphan, was short, bisexual, and stuttered. ...... Does a man's sensitivity have to be explained through these? Can't sensitivity be a healthy force? These stereotypical logics are a real buzzkill, as if all artistic imagination expresses the ultimate disgust for the self.