Novelist’s Collection of Stories Is Laced With Maugham-Like Irony

Prolific, versatile, dauntingly clever, Frederic Raphael is the author of novels (19 thus far), biographies (of Lord Byron and Somerset Maugham), stories, essays, reviews. He has translated the poems of Catullus and the plays of Aeschylus. He has written extensively for television and radio, notably his prize-winning BBC series “The Glittering Prizes,” and is perhaps even better known for his screenplays, including the brilliant “Darling” (based on his own novel of that name), the engaging “Two for the Road” and, most recently, with Stanley Kubrick, the execrable “Eyes Wide Shut.” A dab hand at dramatizing the work of others (for instance, Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd”), he is equally adept at translating his own work from one medium to another.

Born in Chicago in 1931 but educated in Britain, Raphael has the verbal polish often associated with English writers: He is erudite, sophisticated, sharp-tongued. And, judging from several stories in his latest book, “All His Sons,” he is also quite embittered, perhaps justifiably, at his relative lack of renown as a novelist. For, although his novels are far from faultless, the same could be said of novels by contemporary authors who have come to enjoy a much higher standing. There is, indeed, something undisciplined about some of his novels, which tend to sprawl. It’s rather as if, celebrating his temporary freedom from the demands of film and television writing, he revels in the opportunity to take as long as he likes. His stories, on the other hand, are sometimes almost too neat: cuttingly short. But they provide him with ample opportunity to exercise his keen wit and mordant sense of irony.

“God and Mammon,” the title of one of the stories, is a theme that pervades this latest collection as a whole. In this story, Raphael contrasts the ethics of the screenwriter narrator, a decent family man who honors his personal and professional commitments, with the crass, self-promoting, self-exonerating behavior of one of his contemporaries, a famous (Kingsley Amis-like?) novelist critically acclaimed for his brutal honesty and “scathingly satirical” voice.

Raphael draws a similar contrast between the publishing and film worlds in “L.S.D.,” a story set in the bygone days of his youth when those initials usually meant pounds, shillings and pence rather than a hallucinogenic drug. “The only manuscript copy of my second novel had just been lost by the publisher who had begged me for a sight of it,” recalls the narrator. In his disappointment, he agrees to work on a screenplay for an Italian film producer. “Legend promised that screenwriting was a contemptible, but well-paid activity. As a young novelist, I approached Mammon with condescending greed.” But his condescension proves ill-advised: “Gino’s flat lacked the tasteless ostentation which I had looked forward to despising. . .” And, as he soon learns, there’s more to this film producer than there was to the careless publisher.

The narrator of “Son of Enoch” finds himself faced with a far more insidious form of competition in the person of an old Cambridge classmate, the brilliant, multitalented (Jonathan Miller-like?) dabbler Methuselah Soames, who plans to assure his posthumous reputation as a genius by never writing the Great Novel expected of him, and thus, never providing future generations with any lasting evidence of his flaws. In some ways, perhaps the most disappointing piece in this collection is the novella that provides it with its title. Scuttling back and forth between the modes of story and screenplay, “All His Sons” is a dispiriting reworking of a theme handled far more memorably and movingly by Arthur Miller.

A stalwart defender of Maugham, Raphael shares something of his cynicism. In “Shared Credit” and “Who Whom?,” cynicism deteriorates into mere shallowness. But four more, “Emile,” “An Older Woman,” “Bread, Money and Liberty” and “The Siren’s Song,” have a Maugham-like irony and bite. “Do you always have to be cynical?” an on-the-make art dealer asks the narrator of “An Older Woman,” who retorts, “It’s often the quickest way to the truth.” Exposing the self-serving and dishonorable realities beneath the surface, Raphael has an acutely perceptive eye and ear for some of the hypocrisies and evasions of our time.