Somerset Maugham’s play, ‘The Sacred Flame’

I vaguely remember reading Somerset Maugham’s play, ‘The Sacred Flame’ when I was in my twenties. The play unfolds the human weakness; hunger, sleep and sex. The protagonist, a WWI veteran returns home unhurt and untouched by war. He marries his sweetheart but within a year is left crippled in a vehicle accident. Sex becomes essential and an obsession. Since sexual love is absent and cannot be enjoyed between a crippled and a young woman, affection and pity takes over.

Unknown to the protagonist, his pitying young wife and his brother gets involved. His mother knowing this, with mercy in her heart, ends his life, so that he may never know.

This chap never could use his ‘right to live’

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One can get seduced by good books or rather good authors, just as a male gets seduced by a female. If you are not aroused by a ravishing voluptuous female, how do you expect to make love to her? Likewise, if you do not have the passion to read good books, then as Somerset Maugham said, “if it is a labour to read a good book, it is better not to read it at all.”

Agreed!

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Whenever I hear or read about death, I cannot hold back my tears. Something inside of me seems to crack and I have to remove my spectacles and clear my vision. One does not have to experience death (in any case this is one experience that one can have only once in a life time, and won't live to tell about it) to understand that it is painful. Remember the death of Van Gogh at 37 and Somerset Maugham at 91? One prematurely died violently by shooting his head and the other died naturally, if not peacefully.

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