W. Somerst Maugham (1874-1965) was an immensely popular writer (of novels, plays, short stories) during the first half of the twentieth century. I think that his best work was in short stories, although his most critically well-received work was the novel Cakes and Ale, and what continues to be read are his novels Of Human Bondage and The Razor's Edge, both of which were filmed more than once. Many of his other works have also been filmed, most recently, this one.

Originally serialized in Redbook in 1940, Up at the Villa must be less than 30,000 words. In contrast to the film (on which, see my review at http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-377-2358759B-39F489F9-prod3), there is less melodrama and no important Italian character (the screenplay added the corrupt fascist police chief and various plot complilcations). The American widowed princess (played to the hilt and beyond by Anne Bancroft) is considerably less important in the book.

The novella is, then, a tighter story of Mary and three men. She is 30, beautiful, recently widowed after a disastrous marriage to a drunkard who left her barely provided for. She is staying in a borrowed Tuscan villa, pondering the offer of marriage of Edgar Swift, a long-time family friend, aged 54, and slated to be the next colonial governor of the Bengal.

She takes pity on a very inept violinist performing in a Florence restaurant and leaves him a tip ten times as large as anyone else’s. She tells Rowley Flint, a playboy with a reputation for using and discarding women, that giving so much more than could be expected may mean much and make a big difference. It is not clear whether she wants to help where she can or to feel noble (especially in her own straitened financial circumstances).

After Rowley urges her not to marry the dutiful older man she doesn’t love and Mary tells him about some of the disasters of her marriage to the only man she has ever loved, she drops him off. She then sees the violinist who stays at the bottom of the hill below the villa she occupies. Impetuously, she offers to show him the villa’s frescoes and gardens. She learns that Karl was a student and an Austrian patriot. His father had been an anti-Nazi police chief and shot himself the day Hitler annexed Austria. Karl escaped a concentration camp and made his way into Italy without papers.

It is possible to suspect that Mary is having a fling with Youth before settling down to security. And it is possible to suspect that her grand gesture of giving this desperate young man on the run a memory to treasure is narcissistic indulgence of a romantically noble self-image. She knows she’s playing with fire, risking her reputation. She does not seem to know that she’s playing with the fire of the young man’s ego, that he will interpret her giving herself to him as an act of love rather than an embodiment of compassion.

Someone more experienced than Mary might have anticipated Karl’s fury at being pitied. Mary has considerable experience turning down men who come on to her, but other than her husband, she has no experience of sex and of the vulnerability of postcoital male egos. And she has a penchant for honesty that not just Rowle consider excessivey, but tha many readers will. She ignores his advice not to tell Edgar about what happened (when she tells him her peace of mind requires it, Rowley asks, “What of his peace.... It’s madness to destroy his trust in you”).

From having just read Russell Leong’s Ii>Phoenix Eyes,</i> I was especially interested in compassion as a motivation for sex and the question of whether such a belief is a screen and acting on it a way of affirming one’s superiority to the needy other who is supplied a “mercy fu•k.” I think that, like me, Maugham appreciated the compassion, even while recognizing how easily it could be misunderstood.

Maugham skillfully set up the situation and the range of perspectives on sexual and marital relationships in this novella late in his body of work. I think that the central dynamic is of more than historical interest.



Recommended: Yes