The Latest Last One

POINTS OF VIEW (284 pp.)--W. Somerset Maugham--Doubleday ($4.50).

What happens to very old writers when they stop writing? In the case of W. Somerset Maugham, now 85, he just goes right on writing. Over the past ten years he has regularly announced his retirement, and now he once more informs the world that his new book, Points of View, is "absolutely my last." A few critics will hope he means it; in longhair circles the old storyteller has almost never been ranked above a sound literary carpenter. Yet few professional writers can honestly say that they do not envy his easy style, his civilized yarner's gift that makes most current fiction seem drear plodding.

Sixth Sense. More than 80 novels, plays and volumes of short stories have made Maugham one of the most widely read writers in the world--and one of the richest. He makes no bones about money and the pleasures it buys: a villa on the Riviera, good cigars, expensive paintings, luxurious travel. As he once put it: "I had no intention of living on a crust in a garret if I could help it. I had found out that money was like a sixth sense without which you could not make the most of the other five." Maugham's senses are well satisfied, and in this latest last book he allows himself that ultimate luxury: the writing of essays for pleasure alone.

Points of View is no potboiler. There are five essays on subjects not precisely calculated to appeal to the old master's usual fans. He writes about the short story, the novels of Goethe, a Hindu swami he once met, three French writers who kept personal and controversial journals, and about the life and writings of Dr. Tillotson, a 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury. A doubtful lot, on the face of it, but Maugham has the easy knack of wringing interest out of all of them. Virtually all of his information is from other books (which he freely admits), and he says very little that is original. Yet the effect is that of a good conversationalist quietly voicing some private enthusiasms over some very good, very old brandy. His trick is to talk mostly about people and not too much about his advertised subject. The novels of Germany's Goethe make an occasion to discuss a man of genius who found it hard to keep away from a pretty woman. After a lucid introduction to Hindu religion, he describes the life of a swami who found the secret of existence in a boyhood flash of illumination and pursued a course of sainthood to his death. And by the simple process of digging up the diaries of three French writers, he makes old gossip seem as juicily Gallic as a Paris headline scandal. Points of View is, in fact, as bland a job of literary borrowing and cool transformation as has been seen in some time.

Sound of the Swan. The "Old Party," as Maugham calls himself, says he now has "an extraordinary sense of freedom, like a mother who has just had her last one." In spite of cheerfully resigned remarks about imminent death, he is in sound health, reads, entertains, eats and drinks well, and is planning a trip around the world that will include the Far Eastern settings (Burma, Thailand, Japan) of some of his best-known stories. And though this is absolutely his last book, he is still writing. "I am still amusing myself putting down different things that occur to me. But anything so written will be published only after my death." To those who have been listening to the Maugham swan song over a decade, it can only mean that he is working on another "absolutely last" book.

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