Maugham Shorts

EAST AND WEST--W. Somerset Mauglam--Doubleday, Doran ($3).

For this collection of short stories, Author Maugham has selected the 30 he thinks his best. In a Preface that was not written to be skipped, he gives his views on the art of the short story, pays his respects to the two masters of the trade, Maupassant and Chekhov. Maupassant, says Author Maugham, was his early model. "Maupassant's stories are good stories. The anecdote is interesting apart from the narration so that it would secure attention if it were told over the dinner-table; and that seems to me a very great merit indeed. ... I have little doubt that Chekhov would have written stories with an ingenious, original and striking plot if he had been able to think of them." But Maugham gives Chekhov his due: "I do not know that anyone . . . has so poignantly been able to represent spirit communing with spirit. It is this that makes one feel that Maupassant, in comparison, is obvious and vulgar."

Maugham defends both Maupassant and Chekhov (as well as himself and all other popular writers) against the charge of truckling to editors: "Sometimes a critic will describe a book of short stories as magazine stories and thus in his own mind damn them. That is foolish. No form of art is produced unless there is a demand for it and if newspapers and magazines did not publish short stories they would not be written." All but two of the stories in East and West were published in the Cosmopolitan Magazine, whose editor, Ray Long, sometimes cut them to fit but never otherwise edited them.

Author Maugham admits that all his characters are based on real people, calls the practice "necessary and inevitable," but denies that he ever exhibits a complete portrait. If he did, he says, the character would seem incredible and false. What principally puzzles him is why so many critics have called his stories "competent." Says he: "There is evidently something that a number of people do not like in my stories and it is this they try to express when they damn them with the faint praise of competence. I have a notion that it is the definiteness of their form. . . . My prepossessions in the arts are on the side of law and order. I like a story that fits. ... I am not unaware of the disadvantages of this method. It gives a tightness of effect that is sometimes disconcerting. You feel that life does not dovetail into its various parts with such neatness. ... It is certain that sometimes it gives you a sensation of airlessness. . . ." Many a reader or re-reader of these tales will find them good stories, well told, interesting, definite, neat and--competent.

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