Edited by Somerset Maugham

Wyatt Mason

• Pieces for the Left Hand: 100 Anecdotes by J. Robert Lennon
  Granta, 213 pp, £10.00, March 2005, ISBN 1 86207 740 1

In 1945, Somerset Maugham contributed a list to Redbook magazine of what were, in his opinion, ‘the ten best novels in the world’. Maugham’s choices were neither surprising nor controversial (War and Peace, Madame Bovary, Moby-Dick) but in a note that accompanied his list, he suggested that ‘the wise reader’ will ‘get the greatest enjoyment out of reading them if he learns the useful art of skipping’. Skip, then, to the moment when the American publishing house John C. Winston Company, taking Maugham at his word, hired him to demonstrate this art. Under the series title ‘Great Novelists and Their Novels’, the books Maugham had chosen were issued in new editions ‘edited by W. Somerset Maugham’ in 1948. In an essay inaugurating the series, Maugham explained that ‘the novel is essentially an imperfect form . . . to be read with enjoyment. If it does not give that it is worthless.’ Noting that ‘readers in the past seem to have been more patient than the readers of today,’ that ‘they had more time to read novels of a length that seems to us now inordinate,’ Maugham explained that ‘it is to induce readers to read them that this series has been designed’: