"Mostly he only tells of how he went from place to place and what shrines he visited," Maugham reports. His writing is as sparse as the book's title. Martiros is the only Armenian bishop known to man who is tight-lipped. How it survived nearly 400 years to that point is a puzzle. The title of his book, in its 1827 French translation, is Relation d'un Voyage fait en Europe. The date of Bishop Martiros's take-off translates to 1489 AD.
There by the grace of God I found a ship on which I embarked with the deacon Verthanes." Travelling by short stages, I arrived at Stamboul.
When the time had come for me, unworthy though I was, to deserve this honor, which I never ceased to desire, without however ever having made known to anyone the intention in my heart, I went forth from my monastery on the twenty-ninth of October in the year 938 of the Armenian Era. "I, Martyr, but only by name, born at Arzendjan, and bishop, living in the hermitage of Saint Ghiragos at Norkiegh (the new village) had long wished to visit the tomb of the holy prince of the Apostles. Maugham translates for us its opening paragraph: One slim volume, however, caught his eye. Maugham studied over 200 books on his subject, and was struck by the uselessness and banality of nearly all travelogues from the period. The book he ended up writing instead is Don Fernando, a highly entertaining nonfiction account of Spanish culture in its golden age. It was its national character (among other things) that attracted Maugham so fervently to Spain, an attraction he once tried but failed to convert into a novel set there in the 16th-17th century. If he took note of someone, it is good advice for us to do the same. His stories are often like dramatized aphorisms. Character in that sense was Maugham’s favorite subject. Character is what we call anyone who appears in a work of fiction, or who acts like he is living in one. But it is also something else: that homemade gravity with which each of us meets the forces of life and death.
Somerset maugham short stories god plus#
Character plus brains does not equal genius. In the case of Maugham-one of the very few serious writers in the English language to score enormous success for plays, novels, and short stories-it nevertheless equated to a master storyteller with a shrewd eye for the mysteries of human motivation. "I have more character than brains and more brains than talent," Somerset Maugham once wrote.
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