Wasn’t it P. Neruda who said: “When I die, I want to be buried in a name, some especially chosen, beautiful-sounding name, so that its syllables will sing over my bones, near the sea”?
When I first came across the name W. Somerset Maugham in one of my literature classes in school and without actually knowing who he was or what books he had written, I immediately let the cadences of his name roll over my tongue like honey and sometimes even when I didn’t speak his name out loud, I spoke it in my mind. “Somerset Maugham”--beautiful, beautiful name and I couldn’t wait to grow up then and have children so that I could name one or two after him.
Maugham, a British novelist, playwright, and short-story writer, is the author of the very famous book, Of Human Bondage, said to be “one of the great (and passionate) novels of the twentieth century.” I became more enamored of him when he wrote in one of his autobiographies that when he was a young man trying to be a writer in Seville, Spain, he grew a moustache and smoked Filipino cigars.
He has this to say (in one of his books) about the “simplicity of language”:
“Words thus strung (beautifully) together fall on the ear like music. The appeal is sensuous rather than intellectual, and the beauty of the sound leads you easily to conclude that you need not bother about the meaning. But words are tyrannical things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will not pay attention to these, you cannot pay attention at all. . ..Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to .”
How amazingly said!
