Conversations With Willie (1978) By Robin Maugham
The Sunday Age
Sunday August 13, 2006
Robin Maugham was the nephew of W. Somerset Maugham, for a long time the most famous writer in the world. He went on to be a fiction writer himself, the author of The Servant, which Joseph Losey filmed with Dirk Bogarde, but his portrait of his uncle Willie is some kind of masterpiece.
Conversations with Willie is subtitled Recollections of W. Somerset Maugham. Robin Maugham wrote it from diary entries, jotted down just after the sparkle or spittle venom of Somerset Maugham's table talk had been stammered out. It is one of those intimate portraits, written in blood and love and bewilderment, that we hardly ever have of famous people because they presuppose too much attachment and pain.Willie lords it like a Chinese emperor over his luxurious French home at Villa Mauresque. He bites off and spits out the world like a magnificent comic monster and you can tell that his nephew had to feel awe to get up this close. The stammer that Willie suffered throughout his life is the Achilles heel that makes it clear there's a frail child behind the writer who conquered the world of writing, commanding the respect of the likes of Cyril Connolly and being read by millions.What is not in doubt in Conversations with Willie is the grandeur and poignancy of the face that Willie put on to meet even his intimates nor the rage and heartbreak that went along with it.There are the men who love and look after him, one of whom dies during the war. There's Robin, the writer nephew and son of his loathed brother whom he rages at and lectures. There's the woman (by whom he had a child) whom he can barely acknowledge.Robin Maugham took as his subject a loved human being who was also a great man. The chemistry that comes from the collision between the two perspectives is extraordinary but you end up believing somehow in both the greatness and the lovability.
© 2006 The Sunday Age
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