Ivor Brown (1891–1974)

Ivor Brown (1891 - 1974) was a prominent British drama critic who published a wide range of books on the theatre, poetry, and Shakespeare. Between 1925 and 1935, he had reviewed quite a number of Somerset Maugham's plays for two leading periodicals (acc. to Charles Sanders' W. Somerset Maugham: Annotated Bibliography of Writings). Thus, in 1970, when no reputable biography of Maugham had yet emerged, he was a reasonable choice for a contribution about the author for the International Profiles series of books. Now that a number of detailed biographies on Somerset Maugham are available, this work will likely get little attention. It does offer in very concise form a survey of Maugham's life and his literary contributions, along with photographs that have never been reprinted elsewhere in book form. Overall, I find myself ambivalent about the book.

This work consists of five chapters. Chapter 1, "The Life," is a serviceable but brief (12 page) biography that summarizes the life and accomplishments of the author. While containing no obvious errors, it offers no more (and perhaps less) than one might find at Wikipedia or other online sources. Chapter 2 "The Writer" focuses on the historical context of his fiction. I enjoyed and learned from the brief account of the literary mileu in which Maugham was writing. Of particular note is how many of the writers who were highly regarded during Maugham's career (including Meredith, Galsworthy, Wells, and Kipling) are seldom read today. However, I was surprised at how little attention was given in this book to the content of Maugham's work, and the fact that his travel writing and other non-fiction was ignored.

Chapter 3, "The Playwright" deals with Maugham's career writing for the theatre. Knowing relatively little about drama, I learned from this chapter as well. I enjoyed Ivor Brown's sardonic comments about how the pretensions of capital- D "Drama" evolved from "plays," a trend resisted by Maugham (who saw the theatre as a form of entertainment, not education). One excellent feature of this chapter is the included photographs of the characters on stage for each of a number of the plays. On some pages, the author juxtaposed photos of a single play or film as shown in different productions over the years. Thus, on one page we can see "Rain" in the 1928 version with Glora Swanson in the leading role, the 1932 version starring Joan Crawford, and the 1953 film with Rita Hayworth.

Chapters 4 and 5 are respectively entitled "Belief and Opinion" and "The Man". These are the weakest chapters in the book. Mr. Brown engages in too much amateur psychologizing, seeking to explain Somerset Maugham's personality by reference to his early life, and trying to read his fiction as autobiographical. I found his attempts at analysis pretentious and even arrogant (he judges Maugham as wretched and miserable from his appearance in photographs and paintings; he informs us that in Maugham, "emotional disturbance" was a lifelong condition; and so on). What's more, he informs us about Mr. Maugham's sexuality (which in 1970 was not widely known). The final pages of the book are of no value; they contain an extremely brief "Summary of Events" that fails to mention Maugham's literary accomplishments, a haphazard list of his books and plays, and a minuscule bibliography.

Whether the few positive elements of this small work balance the negative ones will be a matter of opinion. There are more definitive sources of information available, although the photographs herein are rather good.… (meer)