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“W. Somerset Maugham: Poor Willie”

Hitchens' review of Somerset Maugham: A Life, by Jeffrey Meyers. Hitchens doesn’t review the biography so much as review Maugham as a write. Some notable quotes from the essay: “Maugham’s overall debt to [Joseph] Conrad is so evident that one usually finishes by putting him down and picking up the real thing”, “Note the slight clumsiness, which seems to have inflected everything Maugham ever wrote”, “..one sees that Maugham’s difficulty was not just a tinge of self-hatred but a real inability to see literary ‘genius’ when he encountered it”,  “Maugham’s success was, in effect, in writing for people who did not have a clue about English as a medium for either tragedy or comedy”,  “Maugham eventually received an honor from the Crown— but it was for ‘services to literature,’ rather than for literature itself, and this distinction represents all the difference in the world.” I don’t think Hitchens likes Maugham. The essay dosen’t spend much time on Of Human Bondage, Modern Library #66 on top 100 Enlgish Language Novels.

New learning: Prior to the First World War, Maugham was a gynecologist “in a slum district of London.”

New word: catamite = archaic term for a boy kept for homosexual purposes form the Latin catamitus.

Great graphic from http://betterbooktitles.com/...alternate title for Of Human Bondage.