I promised to keep discussing condensation from time to time in this blog, and today we have some insights from Somerset Maugham, famed novelist, playwright and short-story writer. He felt strongly that, with few exceptions (we wonder what he thought of Tom Sawyer, pictured?) good fiction can be found to contain ‘a lot of dead wood’. Want to comment? Send us a note.

From Somerset Maugham’s On Literature

An American publisher once put before me the suggestion of reissuing in an abridged form the ten novels that I considered the best ever, with a preface to each one written by me. His idea was to omit everything but what told the story the author had to tell, expose his relevant ideas and display the characters he had created so that readers might read these fine novels, which they would not have done unless what might not unfairly be described as a lot of dead wood had been cut away from them; and thus, since nothing but what was valuable was left in them, enjoy to the full a great intellectual pleasure. I was at first taken aback, but then I reflected that though some of us have acquired the knack of skipping through books to our profit, most people have not, and it would surely be a good thing if they could have their skipping done for them by a person of tact and discrimination. I welcomed the notion of writing the prefaces to the novels in question, and presently set to work.

Some students of literature, some professors and critics, will exclaim that it is a shocking thing to mutilate a masterpiece, and that it should be read as the author wrote it. That depends on the masterpiece. I cannot think that a single page could be omitted from so enchanting a novel as Pride and Prejudice, or from one so tightly constructed as Madame Bovary; but that very sensible critic George Saintsbury wrote that ‘there is very little fiction that will stand concentration and condensation as that of Dickens’. There is nothing reprehensible in cutting. Few plays have ever been produced that were not to their advantage more or less drastically cut in rehearsal. One day, many years ago, when we were lunching together, George Bernard Shaw told me that his plays were much more successful in Germany than they were in England. He ascribed this to the stupidity of the British public and to the greater intelligence of the German. He was wrong. In England he insisted that every word... Read More...