A Marriage of Convenience and Other Stories

by W. Somerset Maugham

This is an Intermediate Level title in a series of ELT readers comprising a wide range of stories - some original and some simplified - from modern and classic novels, and designed to appeal to all age-groups, tastes and cultures. The books are divided into five Starter Level, with about 300 basic words; Beginner Level (600 basic words); Elementary Level (1100); Intermediate Level (1600); and Upper Level (2200). Some of the titles are also available on cassette.

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.

His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.

Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.

During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.

At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.

Reviews

[#DÏ4B7Ø Chinnamasta-Bhairav]

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To SEE a WORLD in a Grain of Sand,
And a HEAVEN in a Wild Flower,
Hold INFINITY in the palm of your hand
And ETERNITY in an Hour"
~ William Blake ~

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“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.” Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is form.
Form is not different than Emptiness;
Emptiness is not different than form
~ Heart Sutra ~

Like the ocean and its waves,
inseparable yet distinct

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" I and The Father are one,
I am The Truth,
The Life and The Path.”

Like a river flowing from its source,
connected and continuous

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Thy kingdom come.
Let the reign of divine
Truth, Life, and Love
be established in me,
and rule out of me all sin;
and may Thy Word
enrich the affections of all mankind

A mighty oak tree standing firm against the storm,
As sunlight scatters the shadows of night
A river nourishing the land it flows through

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[Vaishali · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Note: I read only A Marriage of Convenience and not the other shorts.)

This is the first Maugham short I’m providing quotes for, because they’re snappy and crisp. The story itself is lackluster due to no real plot. Also, he seems to have an obsession with obesity. In fact, if all you did was read Maugham, you’d think early 20th century Europe was replete with the heavyset. He posits them everywhere, center stage, mostly for comedic value. His take on marriage sans passion is similar to one of Indian culture’s justification for arranged marriages… though emptily unconvincing.

Quotes :
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“ … You would have been prepared to find him running a garage or keeping a third-rate hotel in a second-rate town in California.”

“ … The extraordinariness of a man's life does not make him extraordinary, but contrariwise if a man is extraordinary he will make extraordinariness out of a life as humdrum as that of a country curate.”

“ … When you are writing a book you are imprisoned by the four walls of your subject and though for the entertainment of my own digressing mind I set it down now I should be forced in the end, by my sense of what is fit to go between two covers and what is not, to cut it out.”

“ She was just the same size as her husband and just as fat, and she had a round red face like his and the same sandy, untidy hair. I wondered if they had married because they were so exactly alike, or if in the course of years they had acquired this astonishing resemblance.”

“What shall I call him, my dear?'
'Don't call him anythin',' she said. 'Show him a hoop and he'll jump right through it.' “

“Then the Governor, with exuberant gesticulation, burst into a torrent of English so fantastic that it required all my knowledge of French to understand what he was talking about.”

“She towered over her diminutive husband like a skyscraper over a shack.”

“He had the real Italian voice, all macaroni, olive oil, and sunshine, and he sang the Neapolitan songs that I had heard in my youth in the Piazza San Ferdinando…”

“He sang with emotion and false emphasis and his tremolo reminded you of every third-rate Italian tenor you had ever heard, but there in the openness of that lovely night his exaggerations only made you smile and you could not but feel in your heart a lazy sensual pleasure.”