We don’t read anything that doesn’t have art suitable for our website except on the rarest of occasions, so it’s lucky the wave of repackagings of earlier literature by publishers allows us to visit some classics. The acclaimed W. Somerset Maugham’s Up at the Villa came in 1941 originally, with this Bantam edition and its uncredited cover arriving in 1947. It’s about an American widow named Mary Panton, aged around thirty, living in a Tuscan villa. She’s beautiful and desired by two well-heeled men, but is drawn to an impoverished village violinist. When a tryst between the two goes haywire, she’s stuck in a moral dilemma. There’s nothing new in this idea, but Maugham is just a superior writer. Such as here:
The centuries fell away and wandering there you felt yourself the inhabitant of a fresher, younger world in which instinct was more reckless and consequences less material.
Without getting into detail, the pickle Mary finds herself in is the type of fix you’d tend to find in a pulp thriller. How Maugham approaches and deals with this quandary proves that he’s got bigger fish to fry than in any sin-obsessed crime novel. But you don’t need us to tell you that he was excellent at his craft. No less an entity than the British Empire appointed him a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1954, on the recommendation of Winston Churchill, himself a writer. Later Maugham and Churchill were two of the first five writers to be made Companions of Literature. So there you go. Up at the Villa is a nice read.
