Conversations with Willie [antikvár]

Willie—as I called my uncle, William Somerset Maugham, since the days when I was a schoolboy—was certainly the most famous author alive. And he was probably the saddest. This little, frail old man, with a wizened, wrinkled face like a Chinese sage, would shuffle through the vast, deserted rooms of the Villa Mauresque—his luxurious house on Cap Ferrat in the South of France—like a lost ghost. He sought comfort in the past. He was bewildered by the present, and afraid of the future. When I stayed with him in 1965 in this famous villa on the Riviera, I was the first guest for several months. "You know," he said to me, with his pronounced stammer, "I shall be dead very soon. And I der-don't like the idea of it at all." The lines of his face were twisted in miseiy. "I'm a very old party," he said. "But that doesn't make it any easier for me." At the age of ninety-one my uncle William Somerset Maugham still made a fortune—even though he hadn't written a word for ages. The royalties from his books and short stories still literally flowed in from all over the world. And so did the fan-letters: he got more than three hundred a week—most of them from teenagers. (All of them were answered, and all replies were signed.) But he could no longer read the letters himself, for