Allan Massie

A master carpenter

Who did Evelyn Waugh call ‘the only living studio-master under whom one can study with profit’?

issue 21 October 2006

Who did Evelyn Waugh call ‘the only living studio-master under whom one can study with profit’? Answer: Somerset Maugham. Surprising answer? Perhaps. Others judged him more harshly; Edmund Wilson dismissed him as ‘a half-trashy novelist who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious writers who do not care much about writing.’ Actually Maugham took a lot of trouble over his writing, as his notebooks show. They, incidentally, like Wilson’s own notebooks, are full of descriptive passages in embarrassingly purple prose. Hard to see the point of them; when did either author think he might take one of these passages and shove it into a novel? Maugham also resorts to cliché, on almost every page. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in moderation anyway. Clichés don’t distract the reader from the narrative, as more original and highly charged language may.

Waugh explained his admiration. Reviewing Christmas Holiday (1939), he wrote that ‘one reads it with a feeling of increasing respect for his mastery of the trade.

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