Ashenden

Ashenden

By W. Somerset Maugham.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Preface
4. Ashenden
   1. I: R.
   2. II: A Domiciliary Visit
   3. III: Miss King
   4. IV: The Hairless Mexican
   5. V: The Dark Woman
   6. VI: The Greek
   7. VII: A Trip to Paris
   8. VIII: Giulia Lazzari
   9. IX: Gustav
   10. X: The Traitor
   11. XI: Behind the Scenes
   12. XII: His Excellency
   13. XIII: The Flip of a Coin
   14. XIV: A Chance Acquaintance
   15. XV: Love and Russian Literature
   16. XVI: Mr. Harrington’s Washing
5. Colophon
6. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Preface

This book is founded on my experiences in the Intelligence Department during the war, but rearranged for the purposes of fiction. Fact is a poor storyteller. It starts a story at haphazard, generally long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequently and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion. It works up to an interesting situation, and then leaves it in the air to follow an issue that has nothing to do with the point; it has no sense of climax and whittles away its dramatic effects in irrelevance. There is a school of novelists that looks upon this as the proper model for fiction. If life, they say, is arbitrary and disconnected, why, fiction should be so too; for fiction should imitate life. In life things happen at random, and that is how they should happen in a story; they do not lead to a climax, which is an outrage to probability, they just go on. Nothing offends these people more than the punch or the unexpected twist with which some writers seek to surprise their readers, and when the circumstances they relate seem to tend towards a dramatic effect they do their best to avoid it. They do not give you a story, they give you the material on which you can invent your own. Sometimes it consists of an incident presented, you might think, at haphazard, and you are invited to divine its significance. Sometimes they give you a character and leave it at that. They give you the materials for a dish and expect you to do the cooking yourself. Now this is one way like another of writing stories and some very good stories have been written in it. Chekhov used it with mastery. It is more suitable for the very short story than for the longer one. The description of a mood, an environment or an atmosphere, can hold your attention for half a dozen pages, but when it comes to fifty a story needs a supporting skeleton. The skeleton of a story is of course its plot. Now a plot has certain characteristics that you cannot get away from. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It is complete in itself. It starts with a set of circumstances which have consequences, but of which the causes may be ignored; and these consequences, in their turn the cause of other circumstances, are pursued till a point is reached when the reader is satisfied that they are the cause of no further consequences that need be considered. This means that a story should begin at a certain point and end at a certain point. It should not wander along an uncertain line, but follow, from exposition to climax, a bold and vigorous curve. If you wanted to represent it diagrammatically you would draw a semicircle. It is very well to have the element of surprise, and this punch, this unexpected twist, which the imitators of Chekhov despise, is only bad when it is badly done; when it is an integral part of the story and its logical issue it is excellent. There is nothing wrong in a climax, it is a very natural demand of the reader; it is only wrong if it does not follow naturally from the circumstances that have gone before. It is purely an affectation to elude it because in life as a general rule things tail off ineffectively.

For it is quite unnecessary to treat as axiomatic the assertion that fiction should imitate life. It is merely a literary theory like another. There is in fact a second theory that is just as plausible, and this is that fiction should use life merely as raw material which it arranges in ingenious patterns. You have a very good analogy in painting. The landscape painters of the seventeenth century were not interested in the direct representation of nature, which to them was no more than the occasion for a formal decoration. They constructed a scene architecturally, balancing for example the mass of a tree with the mass of a cloud, and used light and shade to make a definite pattern.