III
While staying in Japan, I will try to read as many articles as I can of those written in the annual, Cap Ferrat of which I now have before me the issues No. 4 through No. 15. They are full of interesting contents which are very pleasant to read because most of them are intimately concerned with myself, and also they pay such a meaningful roll building up ties between the members of this society, as well as with the other Maugham fans outside the society, all over Japan.
I hope these writings create more of such chances to connect many other Wm. S. Maugham Xes the number of which would be countless in the future. Whenever I come across some interesting contents in the available issues, No.4 through No. 15, I would like to elaborate on them in the illustrated piece written in English in hopes that they may even reach readers outside the country. Such readers may feel on reading these stories that Wm. S. Maugham has started his second life after his death that happened half a century ago. This, I call the Nuclear Fusion of Human Spiritual life. As the Willie XXIII wrote in his article in No. 13, on page 58, I think it is a well-put ethic that he commented with words “事実は小説よりも奇なり,” (facts act better than novels.) He seems to have read many real episodes that happened in my life, most of which I have already forgotten now. Strangely though, I do not feel any impulse to deny them even if the episodic stories gave readers of my biographical books a very unfavorable impression of my life. I am rather convinced that I was right to have put most of them in my novels by modeling many respectable persons including myself. Furthermore it perhaps explains “The Human Element.” Here, I remembered that I once wrote in one of my books, which I quote here again as ‘My reveries tend often to be concerned with my long past youth. I have done various things that I regret, but I make an effort not to let them fret me. I say to myself that it is not I who did them but the different I that I was then.’ Yes, that was what I once wrote in “The Summing Up” or “The Writer’s Notebook,” either of which it was I have forgotten. May be, Mr. Yuto Okabe can tell it. He is one of the beloved apprentices of Prof. Fumio Fujino and now an excellent lecturer of English literature for university students and a member of the Society Management Staff. I would call him the Willie XXVI. He has, in his brain, listed up all the famous expressions that I used in my writings and were placed in which book, and in which chapter, so much so, that he can produce it before an inquirer within less than a minute.
Therefore, I feel much pleasure in having visited Japan after my death half a century ago, and that is chiefly because I think now like the I who is from the time I was born and spent the years growing up until I reached the age of my forties, a century ago. Of course my life in those years was not always as troublesome for me as what have been written about by my biographers.
That was because I was able to enjoy both a mentally and physically healthy and pleasant spending of my time in writing stories with affluent energy and also the works proceeded by co-working with my most excellent secretary, Gerald Haxton. Here In Japan, again, I am now in a atmosphere similar to the phenomenon of those days where I was able to think and talk as a usual living person. However, that is only possible through one specific person, this time, the Fusion Operator, Willie XXIII. Without him, I cannot exist or talk like this. This occurred all of a sudden through a strange happenstance, and to me, quite unconsciously. Willie XXIII, perhaps, needed to do it, but for what purpose? Perhaps, he felt it necessary to bring me to the site where things go like a theatrical stage and there a kind of nuclear fusion would activate all the actors’ brain activities, enabling conversation between men now alive and the ones already dead for many years. He thinks it as really possible to communicate through those historically remaining written materials, especially, in the style of talking before various listeners. The listeners are, so to speak, the audiences of the theatres who would be sitting before the comedians or Kodan-shi (Story-Tellers) on the street or stages and feeling the pleasure of listening to the stories which are told, as though, by their grandparents.