As leituras levam-me sempre por caminhos inesperados e, de vez em quando, deixo livros a meio. São raros aqueles que não li completamente, porque a eles sempre volto para os concluir e fechar a última página.
Um desses casos é The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham de Selina Hastings que deixei a meio para perseguir Eliot, Duras, Clarice e Cecília. A biografia de Maugham, apesar de temporariamente esquecida, regressa pouco a pouco às minhas leituras.
Maugham não é e dificilmente será um dos meus autores favoritos, mas a vida dele agrada-me, por mais que não seja, por puro entretenimento.
Max Beerbohm in the Saturday Review hailed Somerset Maugham as "the hero of the year... [whose] name is a household word even in households where the theatre is held unclean."
With four plays running, why not five?
Max speculated:
Five plays running simultaneously! Stupendous!... Yet, after all, what are five theatres among so many? Why shouldn't all the theatres in London be Maughamised?
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham - Selina Hastings
Nonetheless they [Gerald Kelly and Somerset Maugham] had a number of attributes in common: they were both tolerant and unshockable, both had a quick wit and a hot temper, although Maugham was better at controlling his; they both had a passion for travel; and they took pride in their intellectual integrity:
Both of us obstinately refused to pretend to admire what really we did not admire - even when we had been told we should admire it.
-said Kelly.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham - Selina Hastings
In October 1897, Maugham received his diploma from St Thoma's qualifying him to practise as MRCS (Member of the Royal College of Surgeons) and LRCP (Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians).
Somewhat to his surprise the Senior Obstetric Physician offered him an appointment, but with his ambition set on a career as a writer he turned it down. He had proved himself competent in medicine and in later life he would always acknowledge the debt he owed to his training.
"I think", he wrote in old age, "I learned pretty well everything I know about human nature in the 5 years I spent at St Thoma's Hospital".
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham - Selina Hastings
Liza of Lambeth, written in three French school-exercise books, was completed in six months, and on 14 January 1897 the manuscript dispatched to Unwin, with a descriptive note, typically pessimistic, attached.
This is the story of a nine days wonder in a Lambeth slum... [which] shows that in this world nothing very much matters, and that in Vere Street, Lambeth, nothing matters at all.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham - Selina Hastings
In October 1896 Maugham arrived at the final stage of his training at St Thoma's, the study of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
The first morning's lecture was memorable.
Gentlemen, woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month, parturates once a year and copulates whenever she has the opportunity.
Recently a new equipment had been introduced, a course in practical midwifery, for which students were expected to be on call for a period of three weeks, and within a mile's radius of the hospital to attend a minimum of twenty confinements.
During his tour of duty Maugham was called out on sixty-three occasions. Temporarily lodged in a room opposite the main gates where he could be quickly summoned by the porter, he was rarely able to snatch more than a couple of hours' sleep, and yet he was almost unaware of his exhaustion so absorbed was he in what he witnessed of his patients' lives.
It was the first time he had worked outside the hospital precints, and it was only now that he saw for himself the frightening reality of the poverty in which large numbers struggled to exist, experienced at close quarters the noise, the stench, the overcrowding, the filthy, verminous conditions from which for many there was no chance of escape.
If the head of the family were in work, the life was tolerable; if not, then the situation was desperate, and in such cases the arrival of another baby was regarded with despair.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham - Selina Hastings
Biblioteca de Maugham @ mymaughamcollection.blogspot.com
Spending so much time in his own company, insensibly he formed 'the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading...'
(...)
And thus, making his way on his own through the books in his uncle's library, devouring everything from travel literature to the perfumed exoticism of The Arabian Nights, Maugham discovered one of the great passions of his life, a passion that would provide both pleasure and inspiration, that would encourage and clarify his own formidable skills as a story-teller, but which would also increase his isolation: in later life he found it difficult to be in anyone's company for more than a few hours before the longing came over him to be alone with a book.
Books were to be his great comfort and resource, his most reliable retreat.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham - Selina Hastings