Old Hand, Old Stuff

CREATURES OF CIRCUMSTANCE (314 pp.)--W. Somerset Maugham--Doubleday ($2.75).

W. Somerset Maugham wrote, at 65: "The profession of authorship is on the whole a healthy one and authors are apt to live on long after they have given the world whatever of significance they had to offer." Still healthy at 73, "Willie" Maugham finds the manufacture of short stones without significance a habit he can't shuck.*

In this latest collection of magazine stories, Creatures of Circumstance, his yarns are as well made as ever, and as full of Maugham's slick brand of irony. Readers will find them useful on long train rides; it is possible to read them while thinking of something else and lose nothing of value in the process. Having nothing to write about, Maugham once wrote in answer to his critics, is "the most inconclusive reason for not writing that I've ever heard."

Creatures of Circumstance contains just one disclaimer to Maugham's candid admission that "I'm a tired old party. . . . At my age, the spark begins to dim." The exception is The Unconquered, a story about occupied France in which a French girl is raped by a German soldier. Later the soldier comes back, learns that the girl is pregnant, falls in love with her and wants to marry her. In her hatred for the German and what he symbolizes, she refuses, drowns his child on the day it is born.

Others, from the familiar Maugham mold:

Appearance and Reality: A suavely naughty yarn about an aging French industrialist and Senator who philosophically finds his mistress even more attractive after she marries another man.

The Happy Couple: The embarrassment that follows when an English judge meets socially two murderers whom the jury acquitted in his court.

Episode: How a prisoner thought so passionately and long about the girl who was waiting to marry him when he came from prison that his love burned out and led to her suicide.

In a preface that heads off his detractors before they can get at him, Author Maugham writes: "It is a misfortune for me that the telling of a story just for the sake of the story is not an activity that is in favor with the intelligentsia. I endeavor to bear my misfortune with fortitude." Routine as they are, the stories in Creatures of Circumstance will provide Old Party Maugham with the kind of royalty checks that help him bear up.

* In the preface to his last collection of short stories, The Mixture As Before (TIME, July 22, 1940), Author Maugham announced: "I shall not write any more stories." Now Maugham insists that it was all a typographical error: a careless printer left out the "m" in Maugham's "many."

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