Willie...

Willie was a kid who stuttered. He lost his parents when he was young and ended up having a real sucky childhood with his relatives. He was awkward with girls, didn’t have many friends, and felt suffocated by his mean uncle. When he was old enough to get out, he escaped. He travelled to Germany and France to check what the art scene was all about. He made some bohemian friends out there, you know, guys who would grow their hair long and not take showers. These cats liked to sit around and argue art and politics. Not a bad way to waste your time, I guess. He was around twenty at this time and realized that he better get a real job. One cold day in April, he abruptly quit the art scene.
Deciding to move closer to home, Willie found a job at a London hospital. He bandaged wounds and even saved a few people’s lives, which affected him deeply, but he never forgot his smelly artistic friends. He decided that he had that artist side, too, and that it tugged at his heart frequently. At school, he had always enjoyed writing so he began to walk around with a notepad and take notes about his observations of life. Sometimes he would write down the way people talked and sometimes he would just stare at their mannerisms or listen to their inflections of their speech. Other times he wrote about the character of the people he had met in his young life and often thought that they tended to be hypocritical and outright liars. Willie was not the most optimistic person in the world.
Since he was a big reader, he would read every night after a long day at the hospital. After reading a page from a book he enjoyed, like say, Moby Dick, he would put the book down. From his memory, he would write down, word for word, the page he had just read as best he could. From his careful observations of his work life, his memories from his childhood, and his reading from classic novels like Pride and Prejudice and David Copperfield, he wrote a play. He felt so good about the work that he submitted it to a London theater company. The company liked the play and staged it in their theater. Before long, he had written several more plays, most of them comedies or light-hearted dramas. Almost every single one was accepted by theater companies. On one occasion, he had several plays running at the same time in London. Willie’s plays were hits.
Being a successful playwright meant a lot of money and fame for Willie but it did not make him happy. He never forgot about his childhood and his stuttering problem. Instead of a comedy, he decided to write something different, something that would communicate the pain from his past. It was the one advantage, he decided, that a writer had over other artists: the writer could communicate their suffering. He sat down and wrote a novel about his life. Being the pessimist that he was, he titled his book “Of Human Bondage.” By this time, Willie was known as W. Somerset Maugham. This book about his stuttering problem (in the book he changed it to a clubbed foot), the death of his parents, and the quiet cruelty of the uncle he lived with, became one of the best-selling novels of all time. He went on to write many other books such as The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale, and The Razor’s Edge. He also wrote hundreds of short stories. Many of his stories and novels were adapted into films. Willie ended up being the best-selling novelist of the twentieth century.
While writing these masterpieces, he was recruited by England to be a spy. He agreed and was very successful at it. His espionage work around World War 1 led him to Russia to attempt to stop the crazy and bloody revolution going on at the time. During World War 2, he spied on Nazi Germany. His work forced him to abandon his home in Italy which the Nazis destroyed. Another time he narrowly escaped France while German tanks were invading.
At the end of his days, (he was over ninety when he died) he reflected on his life and felt like a failure. (Imagine this man, a failure!) I think his problem was that he thought too much. He obsessed over his ineptness with girls as a teenager and he was sad at the fact that some critics didn’t like a few of his books. And he was miserable that he couldn’t stop the revolution in Russia. Here was Willie, a hugely successful playwright, novelist, and spy, and still, he felt like he didn’t do enough with his life. Wow, I wonder if I live to be an old man, and I look back at my life, what I will think about my accomplishments. Or lack of accomplishments. Or maybe, I am just thinking a little too much.