A master carpenter

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. One has the same delight as in watching a first-class cabinet-maker cutting dovetails.’ Waugh was, first and last, a craftsman, and if poverty hadn’t driven him into the family business, which was writing, would have been a cabinet-maker.

It’s years since I read Christmas Holiday, and I can’t lay my hands on a copy; never mind. There’s another novel, Cakes and Ale, so expertly and pleasingly constructed that it makes Waugh’s point. The opening sentences catch you straightaway:

I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone, and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, and it’s important, the matter is more often important to him than to you.