The tone of Maugham's memory registers, nevertheless, more genuine surprise than it does any self-congratulation; for, as he considered his seventh year the last of true personal happiness in his young life, his professional life before 1908 had been no less disappointing for its sense of aims, potentials, and talents continually baffled and betrayed. Those who now interviewed, photographed, and lionized him for his overnight success did not know that success appeared all the more spectacular to Maugham because it was unexpected; because--for all his pluck, and after repeatedly frustrated effort and struggle--professional success, not to say personal happiness, seemed to have proven no more than an impossible grandiosity.
Maugham was, or fancied himself, born into some world of minor grandeur at least. Grandeur's rapid erasure from reality fixed, intensified, and magnified its haunting traces in his memory. He was a British subject born in France, his birth accomplished on the British soil of the British Embassy to avoid French citizenship and thus eventual conscription into the French army. His mother and father were whisperingly referred to as "Beauty and the Beast." Edith Mary Snell Maugham, seventeen years younger than her lawyer-husband Robert, was the beauty of Victorian cameos and silhouettes: fine boned, fine featured, brown eyed, titian haired.
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