I came to this initially via a 1950 film compilation of three of Maugham’s short stories called Trio, starring James Hayter in the title role as the verger of St Peter’s, Neville Square, ousted because he is illiterate, but who finds (as many of us do) that redundancy is actually not always such a terrible thing.
First published in Cosmopolitans, Heinemann, 1936. Read it via the British Council here
What I remember:
Gigolette is a professional diver, whose circus routine has her plummeting into ever smaller containers. Audiences across Europe are astounded and agog, and every show’s a sell-out: sooner or later she’s going to fall to her death, and people want to be there when it happens.
There’s a downturn in the business, that sets Gigolette and her partner Gigolo at odds. I do remember that Gigolette is left no more or less at risk than she was when the story started, except that she has come to dissociate from herself. She views her death dispassionately now: the eventual, inevitable malfunction of a human mechanism. She has died already, and we somehow missed the crucial moment.
What I forgot:
Gigolo is Cotman and Gigolette is Stella. Their fortunes are actually going in the other direction — they’re improving. Getting Stella to dive into a bucket has brought the couple success after years on the bread-line, scratching a living in dance halls and hotels and, by the way, failing to break into the movies. Cotman, we are told, is sincerely in love with Stella, and though he probably believes this, we certainly don’t. After the life they’ve had, love is an uncertain proposition. Hunger and exploitation hollowed the pair of them out, years ago.
Here’s the last line:
“‘I mustn’t disappoint my public,’ she sniggered.”
That “sniggered” is a master-stroke.
First published in Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan, May 1932, and collected in Collected Short Stories Vol 1, Penguin, 1963, now in Vintage Classics, 2000
This is one of the first short stories I remember reading: in the days before YA, you simply raided your parents’ shelves, although I seem to remember my mother actually putting it into my hands. Three well-to-do ladies of a certain age take a long holiday in Antibes, which serves the dual purpose of incessant bridge-playing and a serious attempt to shed the pounds. Perhaps their greatest challenge beyond reduction is to find a reliable fourth for cards; and on this occasion they believe they’ve found the holy grail in the (irritatingly slim) shape of Lena. Vivid, witty and spiteful, it is perhaps at odds with contemporary conceptions of sisterhood, but the tales of trumps taken and “antifat” rusks eaten still makes me laugh with agonised recognition of weak will and its consequent mayhem. Read it, but perhaps even better, listen to Maugham reading it on Youtube, made all the funnier by his pronunciation of the “fet” the ladies are determined to banish.
(first published in Hearst’s International Combined with Cosmopolitan in 1933, collected in Vintage’s Collected Short Stories Volume 1, available online here)
This is the story I always quote if I want to give an example of a story with a sting in the tail. Somerset Maugham is an old-fashioned storyteller, spinning out the story of a self-important woman who flatters and then mercilessly takes advantage of a young writer living in Paris. Her recurring refrain that she never has more than one thing for luncheon couldn’t be further from the truth, as she feasts on out-of-season salmon, oysters and asparagus and drinks champagne. In a few pages Maugham creates two utterly believable characters, and draws deftly the arrogance of the woman and the vulnerability of the young narrator as he sees her eating and drinking her way through the money that was supposed to last him for the rest of the month. She goes off laughing, but it is he, eventually, who has the last laugh. It’s a gem.
(Originally published in Nash’s Magazine, London, in 1924 and available alongside with other of Maugham’s works in modern editions from Penguin)
A Personal Anthology 