Revisiting "Of Human Bondage"

Writing in The Weekly Standard, Jonathan Leaf explores the attacks on Somerset Maugham's reputation. An excerpt:

Such tenure offered him time in which to make money and enemies, and he acquired a mother lode of each. One particularly fierce band of foes was composed of the great number of Communist fellow-travelers, the set that dominated tastemaking during the interwar period. The cause of their enmity lies in a now-forgotten but prescient Maugham novel entitled Christmas Holiday (1939). Its story concerns a young Englishman on vacation in Paris who runs into an old friend, a journalist who wishes to be the secret police chief in a future Communist regime. Unabashedly bloodthirsty, this would-be Dzerzhinsky predicts that a barbaric war is coming and believes that, while he places himself behind the Soviet cause, the differences between the Nazis and Bolsheviks are largely semantic. Motivated in equal parts by resentment and desire for power, this journalist is depicted too honestly to have not gravely wounded the feelings of his confreres.