... Maugham worked for the Winnipeg spymaster Intrepid, convincing the Americans of the need to support Britain in the early days of the Second World War.He was an almost constant world traveller. He visited Manitoba for a month in mid-winter 1912, to collect impressions and stories.
"My God, what a life they lead," he wrote, "surrounded by the snowy prairie, cut off from their neighbours & absorbed with the struggle of getting three meals a day... In one house in which I stayed a wife had killed herself, in another there hung a strange gloom of impending madness."
I love these local connections. I was thrilled, years ago, reading John Cowper Powys's description in his autobiography of walking up Germantown Avenue not far from where I then lived.
Link is fixed (thanks to Dave Lull for the alert.)
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