The Summing Up
Vintage Classics, Paperback, 2001.
12mo. 305 pp.
First
published by Heinemann, 1938.
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The great
German pianist Artur Schnabel (1882-1951) once said that great music is the one
which is better than any performance. If I may paraphrase that, and go a bit
further, I would say that great book is one that not only is better than any
review – of course! – but one that also defies reviewing altogether. The Summing Up by William Somerset
Maugham is precisely that kind of book. If I now believe in the power of books
to profoundly change one's personality, this is largely due to that particular
book and to Somerset Maugham's own personality. For the latter matches the
former to perfection.
I have often
heard The Summing Up described as
Maugham's greatest book and I am ready to agree with such an assessment, though
I should like to add that the book makes a great deal more rewarding read in
the context of Maugham's other works. But I surmise one may well find it
compelling even if one knows nothing of the author or had read none of his
works. One may also, of course, find it revolting. Certainly, however, this is
the book that even the greatest Maugham detractors have to take seriously. Yet,
a good deal of nonsense has been written about the The Summing Up. Perhaps demolishing few myths is a good way to
start this attempt to review what completely defies review. So be warned: heavy
quoting is to be expected.
The most
widespread misconception about The
Summing Up is that it is an autobiography. Nothing could be further from
the truth. Strangely enough, Maugham himself oneself called the book thus – but
in a private letter of his. Since it is far more important what Maugham wrote
for publication, here is the first line of the book:
This
is not an autobiography nor is it a book of recollections.
To be sure,
there are certain amounts of both, especially in the first half of the book,
but none of them is of any major importance. Maugham gives some information
about his childhood, years of struggle, medical studies, sojourns in Capri,
Heidelberg and Spain, success as dramatist or travels, and they are wittily
written as only he could, but they also are no more than a mere skeleton for
the main narrative. Still, for all of Maugham’s vagueness of dates, it is
infinitely more compelling to hear the facts of his life from his own mouth
than retold, rehashed and perverted by biographers. All the same, Maugham had
quite another and much more important fish to fry when he sat down to write The Summing Up:
I
write this book to disembarrass my soul of certain notions that have hovered
about in it too long for my comfort. I do not seek to persuade anybody. I am
devoid of pedagogic instinct and when I know a thing never feel in myself the
desire to impart it to others. I do not much care if people agree with me. Of
course I think I am right, otherwise I should not think as I do, and they are
wrong, but it does not offend me that they should be wrong. Nor does it greatly
disturb me to discover that my judgement is at variance with that of the
majority. I have a certain confidence in my instinct.
When G. B.
Stern once lamented that never had she read an autobiography with so little
''auto'' in it, one hopes – for her own sake – that she was joking; for
otherwise I can't help thinking she never really read the book seriously. Well,
she is hardly alone there. A number of people obviously never went further than
various blurbs on dust jackets or back covers. In the very first paragraph,
with his usual eloquence, Maugham explains that he is not interested in
recording facts that he had already made a better use of in his writings – even
if he could remember them, not to mention that they would seem too tame to guarantee
an absorbing read. An indispensable part of the greatness of The Summing Up is indeed the fact that
it is not an autobiography at all. It
is virtually entirely concerned with much more important matters than the
mundane details of everyday life, boring meetings with celebrities, dull dinner
parties, etc. What this book gives to the serious reader is the complete
personality of Somerset Maugham. You may take it or leave it.
Another often
repeated accusation against The Summing
Up is that it tells nothing about Maugham's private life. True. Why this is
perceived as a drawback is still beyond me, unless it comes from vacuous,
dirty-minded, petty and vulgar creatures certainly not worth my time. It is
also a very good example, as is the autobiography case, of one curious
tendency. It is funny how often people form preconceptions about a book and
then expect to find in it precisely what the author declared is not there:
This
book must be egoistic. It is about certain subjects that are important to me
and it is about myself because I can only treat of these subjects as they have
affected me. But it is not about my doings. I have no desire to lay bare my
heart, and I put limits to the intimacy that I wish the reader to enter upon
with me. There are matters on which I am content to maintain my privacy.
These private
matters must surely have been the sexual ones, for pretty much everything else
about his character is on these pages. For my part, I have rarely admired
Somerset Maugham more than when he penned the above lines. Whatever his reasons
were, I am quite willing to believe that his sexual orientation and his sexual
life were of insignificant importance for his life, the long hand of the trial
against Oscar Wilde and all that stuff about homosexuality as a criminal
offence at the time notwithstanding. Indeed, the fact – reported diligently by
a number of obscene ''biographers'' – that Maugham freely indulged in sexual
escapades would surely have made that element of even smaller importance to
him. For sex is most important and obsessive when it is missing.
Another not
so faintly ridiculous statement about The
Summing Up, most notably supported by Richard Cordell, is that it contains
nothing new because Maugham had already said all these things in his earlier
works. There is a grain of truth in this, Maugham himself admitted as much, but
it is a very small grain indeed. It is also another fine example how people
often search for the calf under the bull, how they expect for a book to be what
its author especially didn't want it to be. What Maugham did want, and did
achieve, with The Summing Up was to
summarise his views about certain matters that happened to interest him very
much: human nature, writing, theatre, philosophy, God, immortality, love,
truth, beauty, goodness and, of course, himself. Since he had indeed previously
said a lot about all these subjects – in the prefaces to The Collected Edition (1934-37) or The Collected Plays (1931-34), or in Don Fernando (1935), or pretty much everywhere else – it was
natural that there would be repetitions. But that doesn't make Mr Cordell's
statement less ridiculous. For the book does contain tons of invaluable
insights into Maugham's inner world you are not likely to find anywhere else in
his works, let alone in a single volume and in so fine a style.
Maugham's
writing style is perhaps the first thing that strikes me when I read The Summing Up. Quite simply, it is
perfect, or at least as close to perfection as any. I have yet to read so
complex a matter written with such lucidity, simplicity, grace and power.
During his writing career – more than six decades – Maugham was obsessed with
searching for the perfect style. I venture to claim that in The Summing Up he achieved the closest
approximation to it.
The main reason
must surely have been the huge amount of trouble he took with that book. Never
before or after did Maugham find writing so hard: he wrote and re-wrote page
after page, cut some passages, added others, changed words, sentences,
paragraphs. In his magisterial study A Bibliography
of the Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Kaye & Ward, 1973), Raymond Toole
Stott claims that of all manuscripts of Maugham's works he has ever seen – and
he saw almost all of them – The Summing
Up was by far the most heavily corrected one. He even ventures the bold
suggestion that it is doubtful that half of what Maugham initially wrote really
reached the printing press. Obviously the book was of paramount importance to
Maugham, even though he was famous for his obsession with constant corrections
in search of the perfect expression; almost all of his short stories appeared
first in magazines but I think it safe to assume that none of them was quite
the same when it was later published in book form.
It is perhaps
worth noting that The Summing Up
consists of 77 short chapters but it might very well be described as one
extremely long essay which is virtually continuous. Form was another life-long
obsession for Maugham. It is a tribute to him that here he achieved continuity
and unity of execution worthy of a Wagnerian music drama; small wonder that
Wagner was Maugham's favourite composer. Unfortunately, the numerous quotes out
of the context give no idea how intricately and imaginatively Maugham
constructed the book. Even the few minor repetitions make perfect sense.
Indeed, as usual with his prose, Maugham leaves the impression that the text
simply could not have been written otherwise.
There is also
another reason for this perfection of style in The Summing Up. Though external and surely of minor importance in
comparison with the first one, it needs to be mentioned too. This is Edward
Marsh, one of the few persons for whom Maugham always had an unqualified
respect. The Summing Up was the first
of Maugham's books, but certainly not the last one, that benefited from Eddie
Marsh correcting the proofs. Some of these were indeed published in what is
regarded as definitive biography, Christopher Hassall's Edward Marsh, patron of the arts (Longmans, 1959), and one may see
how Eddie clarified and improved few expressions, although most of his
corrections are very minor indeed. The aforementioned great respect of Maugham
is no myth. At least twice did he write appreciations of Eddie Marsh, one of
them was published in Publishers' Weekly
under the very suitable title Proof-Reading
as an Avocation. Once late in his life Maugham even stated flatly that if
he had learned to write better English in the last twenty years, this was
largely due to his proof-reader. He considered it a great compliment when Eddie
Marsh told him about The Vagrant Mood,
in the early 1950s, that there is virtually nothing in it he would like to
change.
But as I
often repeat myself: fine style is a powerful weapon, but should you have no
ammunition, you're done. I may safely say that in no other book of his has
Maugham ever been so armed to the teeth. What makes The Summing Up a truly great book is the combination of style and content. But keep in mind that, for
all its lucidity and readability, this is no easy read. It requires a good deal
of application and dedication, thought and reflection. It wants hard brain
work. Only thus could it give you something truly valuable. If you are not
deeply interested in literature and human nature, you had better not read that
book at all.
Perhaps the
single thing I am most impressed with in The
Summing Up is Maugham's candour. Yet again, this is something typical for
him, but I have to say that never before or since did Maugham write about these
matters of eternal speculation, the writer’s craft and, above all, about
himself quite so candidly. If there is another writer capable in print of such
merciless yet dispassionate analysis of himself and his shortcomings, I have
yet to read one. There is modesty and humility here, perfectly genuine to my
mind, but no fatuous self-debasement or inane ramblings. There is nothing of
the hypocrisy Jane Austen so charmingly called ''affectation of candour''. As
far as I am concerned, Maugham's openness is always convincing in its
sincerity. Needless to say, even in his most blunt, brutal, scathing or
scatological remarks Maugham never ventures into the realm of vulgarity and
obscenity.
Since I am
obviously not able to do justice to the subject, I have to resort to quotation
again. But this is all but impossible; one has to quote the whole book;
everything is so perfectly constructed that, should one sentence be left out,
the whole structure would fall. It is almost sacrilegious. But if I must quote only one passage to
illustrate what I mean by unprecedented directness and frankness, it must be
this one:
My
sympathies are limited. I can only be myself, and partly by nature, partly by
circumstances of my life, it is a partial self. I am not a social person. I
cannot get drunk and feel a great love for my fellow-men. Convivial amusement
has always somewhat bored me. When people sitting in an ale-house or drifting
down the river in a boat start singing I am silent. I have never even sung a
hymn. I do not much like being touched and I have always to make a slight
effort over myself not to draw away when someone links his arm in mine. I can
never forget myself. The hysteria of the world repels me and I never feel more
aloof than when I am in the midst of a throng surrendered to a violent feeling
of mirth or sorrow. Though I have been in love a good many times I have never
experienced the bliss of requited love. I know that this is the best thing that
life can offer and it is a thing that almost all men, though perhaps only for a
short time, have enjoyed. I have most loved people who cared little or nothing
for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed. It has been a
predicament that I have not quite known how to deal with. In order not to hurt
their feelings I have often acted a passion that I did not feel. I have tried,
with gentleness when possible, and if not, with irritation, to escape from the
trammels with which their love bound me. I have been jealous of my
independence. I am incapable of complete surrender. And so, never having felt
some of the fundamental emotions of normal men, it is impossible that my work
should have the intimacy, the broad human touch and the animal serenity which
the greatest writers alone can give.
What emerges
crystal clear from this passage – and from numerous others adroitly interwoven
in the narrative – is as complete a picture of Maugham’s character as there
ever was one. Certainly, it is greatly superior to anything his trashy
biographers may offer you. It is a most complicated and rather gloomy affair,
but infinitely compelling nonetheless. Or, perhaps, it is so for me because I
can identify with him to an almost frightening degree.
Maugham was a
loner. His shyness – like that of Walter Fane – was ''a disease'', and so was
his almost pathological self-consciousness. But behind the façade of coolness
and detachment, or cynicism and sarcasm if you like, Maugham must surely have
been an extremely sensitive and high-strung man. He certainly was a man who
knew his mind very well. Few illusions though he may have had about the others,
he had none at all about himself. I wonder how many people really have the guts
to look so deeply in themselves and confess, not in print but just to
themselves, what they see there. For the best part of his life Maugham was the
supreme maverick, creating his own rules and going his own way, enjoying
hedonistic lifestyle to the fullest possible degree, caring little or nothing
for society rules or literary criticism. He was determined to experience every
pleasure there is – and he did. He never liked people much but neither was he a
misanthrope. He observed from distance, he never really mixed with the others;
he constantly tried to understand that incongruous mixture of passions and
obsessions called human animal; he never judged or condemned; he was content to
understand. He never attached an exaggerated importance to what many others
treat with reverence, yet he was all but reverent when confronted with pure
human goodness. He never really believed in God but was awed by the vastness of
the universe. He may have excelled in writing novels, short stories or essays,
but that’s something many people have done. His greatest achievement was not in
the art of literature, but in the art of life – ''the most subtle, the most
neglected and the most significant of all the arts'' as he called it in A Writer's Notebook. He made a conscious
pattern how to spend his time in this world and he lived to see it as complete
as possible. He made a work of art out of his life. And here he is all but
alone.
Strangely, I
am reminded of another figure of indisputable greatness, though achieved in a
very different art, who has caused just as much controversy: Herbert von
Karajan. He too was an artist who practised the art of living all his life, he
too knew his craft as few others, he too was a workaholic, he too set his own
standards and left stupendous legacy. And the words of Gundula Janowitz about
him may well have been said about Somerset Maugham: one of the loneliest men I
have ever known.
Whether one
is fascinated or repelled by such personality is of course a matter of personal
taste. Personally, I am spellbound and inspired. Perhaps the most compelling
thing about The Summing Up is that
Maugham’s unique personality and unmistakable voice permeate every word more
than in any other of his books. He is always and completely himself. Take him
or leave him. If you choose the former alternative, and if you have seen some
of his movie introductions, while reading you can almost hear Maugham's voice, with that notorious stammer of his which in
his late years was next to nonexistent and had been transformed into
well-measured pauses with a good deal of dramatic effect.
It is
significant how often Maugham weaves together personal revelations into
reflections about the writer's craft. This is hardly surprising: writing was Maugham's life. Naturally, the
greatest part of The Summing Up is
dedicated to writing and writers. Judging by the above quote, Maugham might
well have meant seriously what he said about his literary position at another
place, namely that he is the first among the second rate. The critics were only
too eager to accept this at face value and with their passion for futile
comparisons always proclaimed Maugham, for all his craftsmanship, greatly
inferior to, say, Joyce, Proust or Henry James. I don't know about these three
gentlemen, I have not read anything by them yet, but I am most inclined to
regard an author as an end in himself. For all that an author can give you – as
Maugham once said – is himself, his complete personality at most. Now, if a
writer has a great personality – which is of course prerequisite for literary
greatness – he is surely beyond any comparisons. Just like Bela Bartok, who
once said that if a composer is to be judged, he must be judged, not by his
thematic material, but by what use he makes of it, I think a writer is best
appreciated by what use he makes of his natural gifts. And here Somerset
Maugham stands in the very first line of the first rate. Because he made a
brilliant best of a really bad job. As for the critics, nobody has ever
summarised the subject more brilliantly in one sentence:
Criticism
to my mind is a personal matter, but there is nothing against that if the
critic has a great personality.
Judge for
yourself how often you encounter such personalities among the literary critics.
Maugham’s
discourse on the profession of letters in general and how he made the best of
his own natural gifts in particular is thorough, brilliant, compelling and
unbelievably readable. No prose is more quote friendly than Maugham's but,
amusingly, when one is faced with such a cornucopia of insightful touches,
perceptive observations and profound reflections as in The Summing Up, one has to exercise a truly superhuman control over
oneself to resist constant quoting. I have never read a book more densely
packed with wisdom. Yet, who could put the matter more succinctly than Maugham
himself:
I
have more character than brains and more brains than specific gifts.
With this
stunning candour of his, Maugham describes in detail his early years of
struggle, how he learnt his craft at the expense of the public by trial and
error, how he assiduously studied and tried to emulate the masters and a good
many other things besides. Only with Of
Human Bondage did he finally manage to find his own style – when he was
almost forty and already the most famous dramatist of his day. Maugham's Holy
Trinity of writing became lucidity, simplicity and euphony. Fortunately, he
discovered early enough that he had never had a gift for the rich and florid
prose popular at the time. As he brilliantly puts it himself:
I
discovered my limitations and it seemed to me that the only sensible thing was
to aim at what excellence I could within them. I knew that I had no lyrical
quality. I had a small vocabulary and no efforts that I could make to enlarge
it much availed me. I had little gift of metaphor; the original and striking
simile seldom occurred to me. Poetic flights and the great imaginative sweep
were beyond my powers. I could admire them in others as I could admire their
far-fetched tropes and the unusual but suggestive language in which they
clothed their thoughts but my own invention never presented me with such
embellishments; and I was tired of trying to do what did not come easily to me.
On the other hand, I had an acute power of observation and it seemed to me that
I could see a great many things that other people missed. I could put down in
clear terms what I saw. I had a logical sense, and if no great feeling for the
richness and strangeness of words, at all events a lively appreciation of their
sound. I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought
with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed. On
taking thought it seemed to me that I must aim at lucidity, simplicity and
euphony. I have put these three qualities in the order of the importance I
assigned to them.
Maugham's
recognition of his own, and severe, limitations was the beginning of his mature
period which lasted for well over forty years and enriched the world literature
as few others did. He never stopped trying to write better and better with
every new book, and he excelled in these three elusive areas – lucidity,
simplicity and euphony – as I believe no one else before or after him. I
suppose this combination has led John Brophy, sneeringly or not, to describe
Maugham as more a speaker than a writer. True. Reading Maugham always is – as I
keep repeating myself – like a conversation with an old friend by the fireside
with something sufficiently alcoholic in hand. He makes no bones that, if
richness is not something everybody is endowed with, simplicity by no means
comes by nature; nor does lucidity, for that matter. These require rigid
discipline and tireless industry to achieve; euphony, however, is a more
shadowy business and I suppose this must have been one of Maugham's specific
gifts.
If anybody
has any doubts about Maugham’s simply staggering development as a writer, his
oeuvre is there to prove it. Just compare the wooden and dull Liza of Lambeth (1897) with the
enchanting and urbane Cakes and Ale
(1930). You may rightly accuse me of a certain degree of disingenuousness here;
the contrast is indeed much too bright. Compare then Maugham’s best achievements
from his early years – The Hero
(1901), if you ask me, or Mrs Craddock
(1902), if you ask the critics – with some of the best novels from his mature
years; Cakes and Ale would do nicely
here too, but so would The Moon and
Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil
(1925), The Narrow Corner (1932) or The Razor’s Edge (1944), to name but a
few. When Maugham wrote/talked at length about this indefatigable trying to
improve his writing style, he didn’t just talk through his hat. He really did
do that.
Maugham's
dissection of the profession of letters in general is no less comprehensive,
perspicacious and illuminating. Though he never had a gift for richness, he
could appreciate it – within certain limits – in others. But he never had any
patience with writers who require an effort from the reader to understand their
meaning and he is not a little amusing when writes about the two most common
causes of obscurity in writers: negligence and wilfulness; in simpler words,
laziness and conceit, respectively. The greatest danger for the professional
author is something Maugham himself had quite enough of and withstood
remarkably well: success. Some may like to discern a certain indulgence on
Maugham's part here, but they would be hard pressed to find more convincing arguments.
Because success, argues Maugham, may well deprive a writer from the force of
character that had brought him there, not to mention that, as a rule, it puts
him in a new world where temptations abound, the most dangerous one being to
write about it: since he is essentially an outsider, he is never convincing.
But success
is of great importance all the same; it brings artistic freedom and confidence.
Somerset Maugham certainly knew, yet again, what he was writing about; for more
than forty years he wrote whatever, whenever and however he liked; almost
always it was immediately published on both sides of the Atlantic and sold in
considerable, though never stupendous, numbers. He is also witty, fascinating
and enlightening about the disadvantages that a professional writer must cope
with. He must first learn to create the mood and to control his inspiration.
Should he just sit and wait for it to come, he’ll end producing little or
nothing. The writer must have wide and varied culture, but he must resist
pedantry at all costs. The whole world is his raw material but, oddly enough,
he can deal only with a very small part of it that corresponds to his own
idiosyncrasies: amidst plenty of food he may starve to dead, as Maugham
memorably described it. Moreover, writing is a whole time job; a writer
''writes'' in his mind when he reads, goes to a party or travels. It is a dead
difficult thing to be a professional writer. But there is an ample
compensation:
For
the disadvantages and dangers of the author's calling are offset by an
advantage so great as to make all its difficulties, disappointments, and maybe
hardships, unimportant. It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a
tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis, the purging of pity
and terror, which Aristotle tells us is the object of art. For his sins and his
follies, the unhappiness that befalls him, his unrequited love, his physical
defects, illness, privation, his hopes abandoned, his griefs, humiliations,
everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can
overcome it. Everything is grist to his mill, from the glimpse of a face in the
street to a war that convulses the civilised world, from the scent of a rose to
the death of a friend. Nothing befalls him that he cannot transmute into a
stanza, a song or a story, and having done this be rid of it. The artist is the
only free man.
This notion
may sound a trifle simplistic and, admittedly, it didn't always work with
Maugham himself: despite his poignant depiction of Philip's mother death in Of Human Bondage, he probably could
never overcome the death of his own mother. But Maugham's astonishing
productivity would not have been possible, if this notion of his had not been
largely, if not entirely, true.
When all is
said and done, the best summary of this part of The Summing Up dedicated to writers and writing I can think of are
the unforgettable words of John Whitehead who more than twenty years ago wrote:
The Summing Up,
as literary autobiography - that is, one concerned with the profession of
letters rather than with the minutiae
of the author's life - is unsurpassed in this century and should be required
reading for anyone, whether writer or reader, with a serious interest in modern
literature.
It comes as
no surprise to note that, next to Maugham’s personality and voice, what most
permeates the pages of The Summing Up
are his views of human nature. This is especially true of the sections
dedicated to the writer’s calling because Maugham hardly ever wrote anything
which was not, directly or indirectly, concerned with the human beings around
him. His cynicism is all but legendary today; his views of human nature have
often been deprecatingly described as cold, cynical, clinical, detached; some
have gone even further with adjectives like heartless or inhuman. It never
occurs to such people to give Maugham credit for coherence, vividness and
verisimilitude, let alone for common sense, compassion and sensibility. In
fact, the singular detachment of Maugham’s prose with regard to human nature is
nothing more than highly commendable lack of sentimentality and affectation.
His narrations, and most certainly his first person narrators, always have a
keen eye for folly, pretence or vanity, but they rarely miss goodness, charm or
sincerity.
Very few
critics, if any, have ever understood properly Maugham’s views of human nature
or his deceptively simple writing style; they have always been much keener on
emphasising his shortcomings; and surfing on the surface is much easier than
diving in black and menacing waters anyway. The
Summing Up is a most telling proof that Maugham was by far his best critic.
No one ever knew his defects better than he did and no one ever spoke of them
more openly, but without quite unnecessary self-humiliation. When Maugham wrote
in 1934, in the preface for the inclusion of Liza of Lambeth in The
Collected Edition, that he knew the defects of his works better than any
critic, he might well have added that the same was true for his merits:
I have been called cynical. I have been
accused of making men out worse than they are. I do not think I have done that.
All I have done is to bring into prominence certain traits that many writers
shut their eyes to. I think what has chiefly struck me in human beings is their
lack of consistency. I have never seen people all of a piece. It has amazed me
that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and for all
that yield a plausible harmony. I have often asked myself how characteristics, seemingly
irreconcilable, can exist in the same person. […] The contrast that I have
found in people has interested me, but I do not think I have unduly emphasised
it. The censure that has from time to time been passed on me is due perhaps to
the fact that I have not expressly condemned what was bad in the characters of
my invention and praised what was good. It must be a fault in me that I am not
gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me, and
even when they do I have learnt at last generally to excuse them. It is meet
not to expect too much of others. You should be grateful when they treat you
well, but unperturbed when they treat you ill. [...] It is want of imagination
that prevents people from seeing things from any point of view but their own,
and it is unreasonable to be angry with them because they lack this faculty.
I think I could be justly blamed if I saw only
people's faults and were blind to their virtues. I am not conscious that this
is the case. There is nothing more beautiful than goodness and it has pleased
me very often to show how much of it there is in persons who by common
standards would be relentlessly condemned. I have shown it because I have seen
it. It has seemed to me sometimes to shine more brightly in them because it was
surrounded by the darkness of sin. I take the goodness of the good for granted
and I am amused when I discover their defects or their vices; I am touched when
I see the goodness of the wicked and I am willing enough to shrug a tolerant
shoulder at their wickedness. I am not my brother's keeper. I cannot bring
myself to judge my fellows; I am content to observe them. My observation has
led me to believe that, all in all, there is not so much difference between the
good and the bad as the moralists would have us believe.
Another main
subject in The Summing Up,
masterfully inserted between more serious ones, is of course the theatre. Few
people remember today but Maugham's first great success was as a dramatist and
for well over two decades he pursued parallel careers as dramatist and writer
of novels, short stories and travel books. He had a good deal of success and
knew the theatre intimately. In the ''theatrical'' parts of The Summing Up he is as shrewd, witty
and readable as always, missing nothing and sparing nobody. His detailed
investigations of the actor’s calling and the personality of the artist in
general are penetrating and provocative; and so is his analysis of the audience
which is ''shrewd rather than intelligent''. He has no doubt that drama critics
are as a rule the worst judges of plays; such a critic can never afford to lose
himself in a play as the rest of the audience, but since a play is a
collaboration between author, cast, director and audience, thus the critic sees a different play and he may
hardly hope to do it justice from his own, detached, standpoint. Maugham also
has lots of absorbing things to say about the changes in the theatre during the
span of his career there – full 35 years, from 1898 when he wrote his first
play, until 1933 when the last one was first produced – as well as about the
role of the director and what he should or should not do. Maugham’s anxiety on
his own first nights and his controversial theory that plays are ephemeral
stuff that should deal with entertainment rather than with ideas are here too.
The fecundity of stimulating and often surprisingly modern reflections is all
but inexhaustible.
In The Summing Up Maugham also deftly uses
the opportunity to speak quite a bit about another of his favourite themes: the
work of art (for fiction is an art, though a minor one), its communication,
appreciation and meaning. According to Maugham, the artist – a writer or a
painter, for example – must create entirely to disembarrass his soul of
tormenting burdens and thus feel in the end of the creation spiritual freedom
unknown to the ordinary people. Those who create, not from an innermost and
irresistible urge, but for didactic purposes, are simply propagandists and
therefore no artists. Their aim is communication but for the real artist this
can be but a by-product; and so is beauty, for that matter. It is of course
essential for the layman. For it is his business to decide – entirely for
himself – whether an art is great or not:
He
forms his decision from the aesthetic value of the communication that is
offered to him. If it yields escape from the reality of the world he will
welcome it, but is very likely at best to describe it only as minor art; if it
enriches his soul and enlarges his personality he will rightly describe it as
great. But this, I insist, has nothing to do with the artist; it is human that
he should be pleased if he has given others pleasure or greater strength; but
he should not take it amiss if they find nothing to their purpose in the
results of his production. He has already had his reward in the satisfaction of
his creative instinct.
Some people
who know little of Maugham but the usual clichés may well be surprised by the
conclusion he reaches about the value of art and culture: if any, it lies in
the effect on character which should lead to right action, or in other words:
it should lead to goodness. Maugham may well have been a perfect snob when it
comes to titles – how else could he create Elliott Templeton or Mr Warburton? –
but there was no trace of intellectual snobbery in him. That’s saying a great
deal. And so is the following passage:
The
value of art, like the value of the Mystic
Way
Maugham is
merciless to the so called connoisseurs of taste, or persons of aesthetic
sensibility if you prefer. He has no patience with them, sometimes his remarks
are positively caustic. He is dead right though. Who has not seen the immense
vanity, the appalling condescension, the nauseating conceit and the total lack
of tolerance of such people:
I
am speaking now of those to whom the contemplation and appreciation of art is
the main business of life. I have found little to admire in them. They are vain
and self-complacent. Inept for the practical affairs of life, they disdain
those who with humility perform the modest offices to which their destiny has
constrained them. Because they have read a great many books or seen a great
many pictures they think themselves superior to other men. They use art to
escape the realities of life and in their imbecile contempt for common things
deny value to the essential activities of humanity. They are no better really
than drug-fiends; worse rather, for the drug-fiend at all events does not set
himself on a pedestal from which to look down on his fellow-men.
The last main
subject in The Summing Up is the
complicated matter of philosophy, something Maugham avidly read and reflected
upon virtually all his life. Without beating about the bush he frankly
confesses that his thoughts may well be contradictory or superficial, but since
their origins are extremely complex this is likely to be so. Many a writer
about Maugham has been all too ready, again, to accept Maugham's mild
disparagement of himself as a gospel. Frederic Raphael has called these
philosophical reflections ''unremarkable'' and Robert Calder has remarked with
a good deal of condescension that few people would argue that The Summing Up contains profound ideas.
I am one of these few. I would argue anytime with anybody that this book does
contain tons of profound ideas, or least a great deal of wisdom which lends
profoundness to ideas which in themselves may be rather ordinary. Nor must it
be neglected that this last part is as wonderfully readable from the very
beginning to the very end as anything and Maugham's lucidity never falters. He
deals first with religion and God, then with his own holy trinity of values,
Truth, Beauty and Goodness, making for a short time a quartet with the
inclusion of love, and finishes his book with hailing goodness as the only
value in which we may see ''not a reason for life nor an explanation of it, but
an extenuation.'' Somewhat surprising conclusion for a confirmed cynic, I
should think. Until the end of his life did Maugham’s attitude to life remain
essentially sceptical and pessimistic, but much less so than most people think.
Well, what
about God, evil and immortality? No philosopher, wise man, saint or mystic
could ever convince Maugham that some superior divine power, that grants
everlasting flames for the sinners and eternal paradise for the saints, really
does exist. When he discusses evil, however, for one and only time in The Summing Up, Maugham is not entirely
convincing. He lists several philosophic ideas about the existence of evil,
like the one that it is necessary to recognise the good, but attempts no
elaboration except his somewhat hackneyed phrase that he had seen a child dying
of meningitis. His admiration, though qualified, for the doctrine of
transmigration of souls is hard for me to understand. Why on earth should I now
suffer for sins in a past life I have no recollection whatsoever of? Or hope
for great happiness in a future life in which I will remember nothing of the
previous one? All that stuff seems to me strangely inane. Indeed, Maugham came
in the end to the conclusion that the doctrine is unbelievable, and rightly so.
But when he reflects on the relation between God and evil, he is stirring,
provocative, amusing and profound. In the end, Maugham of course does not deny
the existence of God; he just remains an agnostic who cannot penetrate the
mystery:
I
seemed inevitably drawn to the conception of a creator, and what could create
this vast, this stupendous universe but a being all-powerful? But the evil on
the world then forces on us the conclusion that this being cannot be
all-powerful and all-good. A God who is all-powerful may be justly blamed for
the evil of the world and it seems absurd to consider him with admiration or
accord him worship. But mind and heart revolt against the conception of a God
who is not all-good. We are forced then to accept the supposition of a God who
is not all-powerful: such a God contains within himself no explanation of his
own existence or of that of the universe he creates.
[…]
Every
artist wishes to be believed in, but he is not angry with those who will not
accept the communication he offers. God is not so reasonable. He craves so
urgently to be believed in that you might think he needed your belief in order
to reassure himself of his own existence. He promises rewards to those who
believe in him and threatens with horrible punishment those who do not. For my
part I cannot believe in a God who is angry with me because I do not believe in
him. I cannot believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot believe in
a God who has neither humour nor common sense.
[…]
But
though men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in
themselves that does not prove that God does not exist. It proves only that the
religions that men have accepted are but blind alleys cut into an impenetrable
jungle and none of them leads to the heart of the great mystery.
[…]
But
I have been busy with words too long not to be suspicious of them, and when I
look at those I have just written, I cannot but see that their meaning is
tenuous. […] The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme
and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four. I
cannot penetrate the mystery. I remain an agnostic, and the practical outcome
of agnosticism is that you act as though God did not exist.
Having done
with God, Maugham declared without making any bones that immortality is just as
unbelievable. He makes perfect fools of the philosophers who have expounded the
ridiculous notion about ''limited survival'', that is a limited number of
people capable of ''spiritual fulfilment'' who will be granted access to the
Other world in order to reach that state of perfection. This is one of the most
delightful passages in the whole book:
But when one comes to enquire into the
qualities which in this case will admit the chosen few into the blessings of
this limited survival one makes the disconcerting discovery that they are those
that few but philosophers possess. One cannot but wonder, however, in what
manner the philosophers will pass their time when their virtue has received its
due reward, for the questions that occupied them during their sojourn on earth
will presumably have received their adequate replies. One can only suppose that
they will take piano lessons from Beethoven or learn to paint in water colour
under the guidance of Michelangelo. Unless these two great men have much changed
they will find them irascible masters.
Such
reflections about God, immortality and afterlife cannot but bring forth
discussion on the meaning of life and the secret of living. How should one
conduct oneself in this life and in this world if there are no such things as
God and eternal damnation/bliss? Maugham explains again, rather charmingly, his
conception of pattern in life and he gives another revealing insight into his
inner self:
I have sought to make a pattern of my life.
This, I suppose, might be described as self-realisation tempered by a lively
sense of irony; making the best of a bad job.
It
is one of the faults of my nature that I have suffered more from the pains,
than I have enjoyed the pleasures, of my life.
But when
Maugham accepts the possibility that socially imposed, instinctive patterns of
life may be just as complete as self-imposed ones, and even that the ''blind
slaves'' may have the greater wisdom, he positively rises to a level of
compassion that amounts to all but pure personal greatness:
Most
people live haphazard lives subject to the varying winds of fortune. Many are
forced by the situation in which they were born and the necessity of earning a
living to keep to a straight and narrow road in which there is no possibility of
turning to the right or to the left. Upon these the pattern is imposed. Life
itself has forced it on them. There is no reason why such a pattern should not
be as complete as that which anyone has tried self-consciously to make.
Most people think little. They accept their
presence in the world; blind slaves of the striving which is their mainspring
they are driven this way and that to satisfy their natural impulses, and when
it dwindles they go out like the light of a candle. Their lives are purely instinctive.
It may be that theirs is the greater wisdom.
How about
Truth, Beauty and Goodness? And love, too. Can any of these values be regarded
strong enough to justify the existence of Man on Earth?
Truth
certainly comes out with pretty poor chances to be one of the ultimate values.
Maugham is not the man to mince words:
Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe, and his idealism, it has sometimes seemed to me, is merely his effort to attach the prestige of truth to the fictions he has invented to satisfy his self-conceit.
So much for
Truth.
Beauty
certainly stands in a better position, but everybody who has read Maugham’s
novel Cakes and Ale, first published
eight years before The Summing Up,
knows perfectly well that beauty has no chance, either. By that time, Maugham
had already renounced art for art’s sake and all that nonsense he eagerly
believed in his youth that the beauty an artist creates now and then is the
only justification for the suffering of the masses there is. One of the most
hilarious passages in the book is indeed Maugham’s description of his circle of
passionate, art-loving friends on Capri while
he was still a medical student:
I listened with transport to conversations, up
at Anacapri at the colonel's house, or at Morgano's, the wine shop just off the
Piazza, when they talked of art and beauty, literature and Roman history. I saw
two men fly at one another's throats because they disagreed over the poetic
merit for Heredia's sonnets. I thought it all grand. Art, art for art's sake,
was the only thing that mattered in the world; and the artist alone gave this
ridiculous world significance. Politics, commerce, the learned professors -
what did they amount to from the standpoint of the Absolute? They might
disagree, these friends of mine (dead, dead every jack one of them), about the
value of a sonnet or the excellence of a Greek bas-relief (Greek, my eye! I
tell you it's a Roman copy and if I tell you a thing it is so); but they were
all agreed about this, that they burned with a hard, gem-like flame. I was too
shy to tell them that I had written a novel and was half-way through another
and it was a great mortification to me, burning as I was too with a hard,
gem-like flame, to be treated as a philistine who cared for nothing but
dissecting dead bodies and would seize an unguarded moment to give his best
friend an enema.
Some three or
four decades later Maugham’s attitude to beauty had changed out of all
recognition. Beauty was now a ''full stop'', an exquisite and powerful
sensation, but short and impossible to preserve. Moreover, Maugham found to his
dismay, the more beautiful a work of art is, the least scope it gives to his
imagination, thus making the satisfaction of his aesthetic sense even more
ephemeral. Beauty is linked with perfection and perfection is apt to be dull.
Most strangely, perhaps, Maugham discovered that beauty was not at all ''a joy
forever'', as Keats passionately claimed, but quite the opposite: every
generation has a different perception for beauty, usually quite different than
the preceding one, not to mention that some works of art may with time not only
gain but even acquire beauty. Nothing so fickle could Maugham regard as an
ultimate value.
I am pretty
sure Maugham’s view of love would outrage a good many romantic souls. They will
cry out, rightly, that Maugham makes no difference between love and lust. But
is there any difference between them? If love should really be regarded as
''the exultation, the sense of power, the feeling of heightened vitality'' as
it usually is, I cannot see how we can escape the fact that it is firmly rooted
in the sexual instinct. Otherwise, we are left with affection.
However
much people may resent the fact and however angrily deny it, there can surely
be no doubt that love depends on certain secretions of the sexual glands. In
the immense majority these do not continue indefinitely to be excited by the
same object and with advancing years they atrophy. People are very hypocritical
in this matter and will not face the truth. They so deceive themselves that
they can accept it with complacency when their love dwindles into what they
describe as a solid and enduring affection. As if affection had anything to do
with love!
Note the
exclamation mark. It is something Maugham rarely used and it does speak
volumes. He always regarded affection as something completely different than love, something ''created by habit,
community of interests, convenience and desire of companionship'', ''a comfort
rather than an exhilaration'', but he always had a lot of respect for it.
Surely, it was not for nothing that he made his first person narrator in the
short story ''The Book-Bag'' say the following words:
Though
I said that affection was the greatest enemy of love, I would never deny that
it's a very good substitute. I'm not sure that a marriage founded on it isn't
the happiest.
By the way,
with regard to Maugham’s views of love, he was even more brutal, but perfectly
in character, when he gave Simon from Christmas
Holiday, first published on the next year after The Summing Up, a most
impressive tirade about love:
An
awful lot of hokum is talked about love, you know. An importance is ascribed to
it that is entirely at variance with fact. People talk as though it were
self-evidently the greatest of human values. Nothing is less self-evident.
Until Plato dressed his sentimental sensuality in a captivating literary form
the ancient world laid no more stress on it than was sensible; the healthy
realism of the Muslim has never looked upon it as anything but a physical need;
it was Christianity, buttressing its emotional claims with neo-Platonism, that
made it into the end an aim, the reason, the justification of life. But
Christianity was the religion of slaves. It offered the weary and the
heavy-laden heaven to compensate them in the future for their misery in this
world and the opiate of love to enable them to bear it in the present. And like
every drug it enervated and destroyed those who became subject to it. For two
thousand years it's suffocated us. It's weakened our wills and lessened our
courage. In this modern world we live in we know that almost everything is more
important than love, we know that only the soft and the stupid allow it to
affect their actions, and yet we pay it a foolish lip-service. In books, on the
stage, in the pulpit, on the platform the same old sentimental rubbish is
talked that was used to hoodwink the slaves of Alexandria
Of course
this was not Maugham but a character of his invention, yet the passage is worth
considering nonetheless. All the more so since we can be pretty sure it
reflects Maugham’s views of love and Christianity quite accurately.
People are
indeed lucky if their love is in time transformed into a long-lasting
affection. The passage in which Maugham describes how love dies, obviously
without giving birth to affection, is immensely poignant and I wonder if there
are so many people worldwide who cannot identify at least partly with these words:
We
are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a
happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. Mostly,
different ourselves, we make a desperate, pathetic effort to love in a
different person the person once loved. It is only because the power of love
when it seizes us seems so mighty that we persuade ourselves that it will last
for ever. When it subsides, we are ashamed, and, duped, blame ourselves for our
weakness, whereas we should accept our change of heart as a natural effect of
our humanity.
All in all,
Maugham is convinced that love, or at least sexual love, is far from suitable
to be a serious candidate for a value giving meaning to life. No matter how
powerful and wonderful it may be, the transitory nature of love, which nobody
but a perfect fool would deny, is also its tombstone. But Maugham’s view of
love is not that simple. There is a second kind of love, one that is not
entirely devoid of the sexual element, but neither is it fully dependent on it;
one that is much more lasting than the sexual love and, unlike beauty, can be
perfect without being dull. Maugham calls this phenomenon loving-kindness, and
this is the end of the story:
Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists and makes it a little less difficult to practise those minor virtues of self-control and self-restraint, patience, discipline and tolerance, which are the passive and not very exhilarating elements of goodness. Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward. I am ashamed to have reached so commonplace a conclusion. With my instinct for effect I should have liked to end my book with some startling and paradoxical announcement or with a cynicism that my readers would have recognised with a chuckle as characteristic. It seems I have little more to say than can be read in any copybook or heard from any pulpit. I have gone a long way round to discover what everyone knew already.
Looking back
on what I have written and quoted, I am terribly conscious that it does no
justice whatsoever to book like The
Summing Up. It is painfully inadequate. It conveys really nothing of the
authoritative yet gentle voice, the elaborate yet absorbing narrative, and the
complicated yet compelling personality of Somerset Maugham. I might just as
well have left out my own reflections and made a ''review'' entirely of quotes –
thrice longer. There is so much more between these pages: it is just impossible
to give any good idea of the real scope of that book and the amount of wisdom
it contains. But, then again, great books should be read and re-read, not
reviewed or written about. Whether one agrees or not is of little consequence.
One thinks. One is changed. Perhaps for the better.
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