A Writer's Notebook

- William Somerset Maugham

1897

1

The spirituality of man is most apparent when he is eating a hearty dinner.

2

T. was standing at a railway station; a woman came up to him and told him that he had prosecuted her in a criminal action, and he was so kind that she wanted to thank him. She wanted above all to assure him that she was innocent. He couldn’t even remember her face. What to her was a tragic and dreadful ordeal to him was no more than a drab little incident which had slipped his memory.

3

A Thames waterman was in love with a girl and couldn’t take her on the spree for lack of money. He saw a body in the water, a man who gave some last signs of life; but he got no money for saving a live man, so he put his hook in his clothes and dragged him in. The man was landed, and a bystander said he wasn’t quite dead. The waterman turned upon him and blackguarded him. He laid the man on his face and effectually prevented him from recovering. So he got his five shillings and took his donah out.

4

Three women were charged at the police court. They were whores. Two were strong and healthy, but the third was dying of consumption. The first two had money and paid their fines, but the third had none. Fourteen days. In a little while the two came back, having pawned their jackets notwithstanding the cold, and paid the fine. They refused to let the girl go to the workhouse infirmary. “We’ll see the last of her,” they said, and all three went into a brothel. They looked after the dying girl for a month, and then she died. They paid for her funeral, to which they went, each with a wreath, in new black dresses, driving in a cab behind the hearse.

5

A woman sat looking at her husband. He was in bed drunk, and it was the twentieth anniversary of their wedding. When she married him she thought she was going to be happy. Married to an idler, a drunkard and a brute, her life had been one of hardship and of misery. She went into the next room and took poison. She was taken to St. Thomas’s and recovered, but then was charged at the police court with attempted suicide. She said nothing to excuse herself, but her daughter stood up and told the magistrate all her mother had had to suffer. She was given a separation order under which she was to receive fifteen shillings a week. The husband signed the deed of separation and, having done this, put down fifteen shillings, saying: “Here’s your first week’s money.” She picked it up and flung it in his face. “Take your money,” she screamed, “give me back my twenty years.”

6

The other day I went into the theatre to see a Cæsarian. Because it’s rarely done it was full. Before starting Dr. C. made a short discourse. I didn’t listen very attentively, but I seem to remember his saying that the operation so far was seldom successful. He told us that the patient couldn’t have a child naturally and had had to be twice aborted; but she’d set her heart on having one now that she was pregnant again and though he’d explained the danger to her and said that it was only an even chance that she’d come through, she’d told him that she was prepared to risk it. Her husband wanted it too, and that seemed to weigh with her. The operation appeared to go very well and Dr. C’s face beamed when he extracted the baby. This morning I was in the ward and asked one of the nurses how she was getting on. She told me she’d died in the night. I don’t know why, it gave me a shock and I had to frown because I was afraid I was going to cry. It was silly, I didn’t know her, I’d only seen her on the operating table. I suppose what affected me was the passion of that woman, just an ordinary hospital patient, to have a baby, a passion so intense that she was willing to incur the frightful risk; it seemed hard, dreadfully hard, that she had to die. The nurse told me the baby was doing well. That poor woman.

7

The cri du cœur is never without its effect, but the odd thing is that it need never come from the heart at all; it need only be perfectly simulated, and the trick is done.

8

A big dinner-party is merely an opportunity for the common indulgence of sensual appetites.

9

The Vicar expounded twice on Sunday the more obvious parts of the Scriptures, in twenty minutes or so, making for the benefit of the vulgar a number of trite reflections in a slovenly language compounded from the Authorised Version and the daily papers. He had a great facility for explaining earnestly and at decorous length texts which were plain to the poorest intelligence. His offertories were devoted alternately to the poor of the parish and to the necessities of the church. He saw a connection between the need for coal to warm the vestry and for candles to light the altar and the dogmas of religion. So on these occasions he made it his practice to attack the scarlet weeds of heresy, expounding to an intelligent congregation of yokels and small boys, the difficulties of the Athanasian Creed. But he was at his best when he poured the withering vials of his contempt on the false crowd of Atheists, Romanists, Dissenters and Scientists. He could barely keep serious in his scorn for the theories of evolution; and would set up like a row of ninepins the hypotheses of philosophers and learned men and knock them down by the aid of his own fearless intellect. It might have been a dangerous experiment but that his congregation were convinced beyond the need of argument of the faith of their fathers, and not very attentive listeners.

1900

1

When a woman of forty tells a man that she’s old enough to be his mother, his only safety is in immediate flight. She’ll either marry him or drag him through the divorce court.

2

One should always cultivate one’s prejudices

Cornwall. The wind dragged up the sea by its roots and the water in heavy dark masses hurled itself against the rocks. Overhead the sky was in frantic motion, the tormented clouds raced across the night and the wind whistled and hissed and screamed.

3

Fragments of cloud, tortured and rent, fled across the sky like the silent souls of anguish pursued by the vengeance of a jealous God.

4

There was a moaning of thunder in the distance and one by one fell the first rain-drops; they were like the tears of God.

5

The wind was like a charioteer in a chariot, and the horses, muscles straining, quivered in their traces; he lashed them furiously with his whip and they sprang forward with a rush and a whirl, and the morning air was rent with a long, shrill scream as though women in panic fled a danger there was no escaping.

6

I wandered at random, and the soft ground, broken by the tortuous courses of a hundred streamlets, with its carpet of brown, dead leaves, exhaled an odour of moist soil, the voluptuous scents of our mother, the Earth, gravid with silent life. The long branches of the briar-rose entangled my feet. Here and there, in sheltered corners, blossomed the primrose and the violet. The delicate branches of the beech trees were black amid the young leaves, vivid and tender, that had but just burst their buds. It was an emerald paradise. The eye could not pierce that intricate greenery. It was a filagree finer upon the slender twigs than the summer rain and more subtle than the mists of sunset. It was as intangible as a beautiful thought. It was a scene that drove away all thought of the sadness and the bitterness of life. The verdure was so pure that my mind became pure also and I felt like a child. Here and there, far above the other trees, rose a fir, immensely tall, straight as a life without reproach; but cheerless, cold and silent. The only sound was the rustling of a rabbit among the dead leaves or the hasty springing of a squirrel.

After the rain, in the evening, the birds broke into such a joyous chant that it seemed impossible that it was a world of sorrow. Hidden among the leaves, aloft in the beeches, the starling sang with full-throated melody; and the bullfinch and the thrush. From a distant meadow a cuckoo called with endless repetition, and far away, like an echo, a second cuckoo called back.

7

The Green Park in Winter.

The snow fell lightly as the footsteps of children. The snow lay masking the trim pathways, shrouding the trodden grass, the snow as far as one could see, on the housetops, on the trees. The sky was low, heavy with the cruel cold, and the light was grey and dim. In a long line gleamed the round lamps, and entangled with the leafless trees was a violet mist, and it trailed along the ground like the train of the winter night. The piercing cold had killed the other colours, but the mist was violet, exquisitely soft, but cold, cold so that the weary heart could scarcely endure its anguish. The houses of Carlton House Terrace were dark menacing masses against the whiteness of the snow. The day dwindled away in a ghostly silence, and there was no glimpse even of the setting sun. The grey sky grew darker, and the lights gleamed more brightly, surrounded each one by a pale aureole.

8