In the following essay excerpt, Whitehead explores thematic elements in the stories in Maugham's collection The Trembling of a Leaf, calling "The Fall of Edward Barnard" "pure comedy."

In the notebooks Maugham brought back from his wartime voyaging in the South Seas were entries relating to other places besides Tahiti, in particular Honolulu and islands in the Samoan group, and these he came to recognize as providing raw material for short stories, a genre he had abandoned along with the novel ten years previously on making his breakthrough in the theatre. But the stories suggested by this material would be of a different kind and on an ampler scale than any he had previously attempted. There were eventually six of them, each of between 12,000 and 15,000 words in length, which together made a book about the size of the average novel. The Trembling of a Leaf was the...