Barzun on Maugham: I can't resist

Though I love Somerset Maugham's fiction and think him lamentably underrated for reasons it would, on another occasion, be interesting to explore, I can't resist this little riff from Jacques Barzun's "Meditations on the Literature of Spying," which appeared in The American Scholar in Spring 1965 -- long before other scholars of academic note were taking this literary genre with anything like seriousness. Barzun is registering his weariness with Maugham's "disillusioned stance" in The Narrow Corner (1944), which has become, Barzun says, the standard attitude of the hero as modern spy in works by lesser novelists.

<<<
To know that everything and everybody is a fraud gives the derivative types what they call a wry satisfaction. Their borrowed system creates the ironies that twist their smiles into wryness. They look wry and drink rye and make a virtue of taking the blows of fate wryly. It is monotonous: I am fed up with the life of wryly.
>>> 

It's a terrific, very quotable essay, with a superb passage on how spy stories reflect "the romance of the age." I will type it into a post some other time. Barzun was on the cover of Time on my birthday in 1956.  -- DL

Comments

[bill]

the modern spy, they may look wry but their drink of choice is most definitely a martini shaken not stirred...maybe blofeld (The Count de Bleuchamp) drank rye....in fact, i hear that there is a rare barrel of whiskey labelled Spectre No. 1 forthcoming at auction....

[Terry Teachout]

Alas, (A) Somerset Maugham didn't write "The Narrow Corner" in 1944, and (B) it's not a spy story.

[DL]

I didn't think I was inviting a teach-in on the subject, but for the record (A) Barzun in his "American Scholar" essay argues that "Dr. Saunders, the hero-observer of the well-named Narrow Corner," has served as a model for "second- and third-hand fiction [that] has copied and exploited the disillusioned stance of the masters." Barzun does not call "The Narrow Corner" a spy novel -- his thought is rather that certain spy novels derive their stance from modern masters. But of course Barzun was also aware that Maugham in "Ashenden" had invented the modern spy story and so his presence in this context is doubly apt.(B) For whatever reason, Barzun in his "American Scholar" essay cites (footnotes) a 1944 paperback version of "The Narrow Corner." -- DL