POINTS OF VIEW

London: Heinemann, 1958. First Edition. 8vo, publisher’s original green cloth lettered in gilt on on red lables on the spine and upper cover, in the original dustjacket. (vi), 255 pp. A very fine copy, near as pristine. FIRST EDITION. Points of View is a collection of essays by W. Somerset Maugham, first printed in 1958, the penultimate work in book form that the author published.
It consists of five essays: "The Three Novels of a Poet," "The Saint," "Prose and Dr. Tillotson," "The Short Story," and "Three Journalists." It took him six years to compile Points of View...The five essays have in common Maugham's rumination on the effects of the life of his chosen subjects on their works. He studied in details each of them and discussed significant events he could find in biographies and letters that determine the content and mode of their creations. Although it may not be felt at the first reading, Maugham has selected the incidents with care. His thesis is that it is the author's personality that matters. He sees in each of them idiosyncrasies so prominent and intriguing that compensate for whatever else is lacking.
Furthermore, these essays are like one long defence against the accusations that Maugham received for using real persons as models for his fictional characters. Putting his subjects' lives side by side with their artistic creations it is hard to argue otherwise, and it would be a meaningless exercise. Writers/artists use their own lives as materials, they transform and rearrange them just as the demiurge shapes the world into meaningful existence. The people that Maugham has chosen are public figures, except the swarmi who may not be familiar to his readers. They have come to our time and achieved a certain immortality. In this way, they have succeeded. His first essay is on Goethe, a revered name in literary history. However, under Maugham's pen he is as human as anyone else.
These worldly and successful people, who had worked hard in different ways to get where they were, seemed at the same time so fragile and vulnerable. In spite of their achievements, their lives were filled with uncertain aims and unfulfilled dreams; Maugham is able to pierce through worldly success and look at things from a different point of view, measuring his subjects' lives through an examination of the journey that they had gone through, from there to draw the yardstick. Points of View (1958) by W. Somerset Maugham." My Maugham Collection. Blogger, 24 July 2015.