The convention is that if you happen to meet authors and have just bought or acquired a book of theirs, you ask them to sign it. Particularly stuffy authors might refuse, but in most cases they feel flattered and duly inscribe your name and theirs on the title page or the flyleaf of the book in question. If the mood is right, they may add ‘with best wishes’ or something of the sort. At a superficial level, of course, such signatures are only the equivalent of an autograph album. There’s more to it than that, however. Added value perhaps, but association certainly. The human race lives by the stories we tell ourselves about our identity and our purposes, and that signature helps to make the author’s story part of the reader’s story.
Somerset Maugham
Don Fernando, 1950
As a boy, I was under the impression that Maugham was the greatest living writer, and if not the greatest, surely the most famous. Early in his own literary career, my father had got to know him and in 1953 took me to stay with Maugham at Cap Ferrat in the South of France. I was impressed. You went into what appeared an endless vista of black and white flags on the floor. Then there was a very large drawing room. Martinis were mixed at half past twelve; there were two or three before lunch and the same again at six o’clock. I was very conscious of the Master upstairs in his study, at work. He would come down for a walk and this would be the central part of the day. I was taken around the garden by him, very slowly, with Alan Searle, who’d been his secretary before becoming his partner. Maugham was particularly friendly to me and anxious to know if I’d read his books and what the young thought of them. The movements of his mouth as he overcame his stammering gave him the look of a Galapagos tortoise. It was night and I was in my room about to go to sleep when he came in and sat on the bed. I was slightly apprehensive, but all he did was to give me this copy of Don Fernando carefully inscribed, ‘For David, when he goes to Spain from his ancient friend W. Somerset Maugham.’
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