Anthony Curtis
The Pattern of Maugham
Hamish Hamilton, 1974.
1. Oeuvre and Environs
The first
point to make about Maugham is that he trusted literature. It was the one
activity in which he had complete and lasting faith. He made a wholehearted
surrender to it from boyhood to old age. Medicine in which he qualified but
never in fact practised was a kind of insurance cover. As soon as he had
published his first novel at the age of twenty-three he determined to live if
he possibly could by and for literature. He had inherited some money from his
father, enough to give him a modest livelihood, and he gambled this on his
future as a writer.
After about
ten years the gamble paid handsome rewards; from then on his income from his
writing was never in doubt. He made a huge fortune and lived the life of a rich
man. Maugham’s affluence, his love of money and his ability to make a great
deal of it, has undoubtedly stood in the way of a just appreciation of his work
in his native country and in other places where a puritan conscience encourages
the view that a serious writer has no business making a lot of money out of his
work until he is safely in his grave, or at least too old to enjoy it fully,
and that he can only perform this singular feat of lucrativeness by forfeiting
this seriousness. Edmund Wilson, to name the most influential of Maugham’s
detractors, clearly felt that Maugham had no right to be seriously considered
and took the opportunity of knocking him off the perch of eminence onto which
he had landed safely at the end of his life in a damaging review of one of his
least characteristic books.[1]
[…]
My own
position is that Maugham’s seriousness is beyond doubt, as should be plain from
my attempting to write this book and spending as much time with his work as
this undertaking involves; but to determine where and how we place him among
the writers of this century is, it seems to, a task of stimulating difficulty
and fascination.
Even
Maugham’s most severe detractors will usually grant that he was a great professional.
By this one means in external terms that he kept regular writing hours and as
soon as he had finished one work he began another. The only interruption to the
routine of writing was when he went on his travels, as he did annually for many
years, but these travels were all part of the writing programme. He went with
both an open mind and a sense of purpose, and his wanderings rarely failed to
provide him with the raw material for a book. New books by Maugham never needed
to be heralded by his publishers as ‘long-awaited’ or ‘breaking a long
silence’; they appeared with unvarying punctuality from his twenties to his
eighties.
[…]
Maugham’s
conservatism was seen at its staunchest in his lifelong faith in the sovereign
power of narrative; all his books are constructed on the principle of a
sequence of events that first of all arouses, and then prolongs and ultimately
satisfies the reader’s curiosity. Maugham clung tenaciously to the linear logic
of narrative at a time when his colleagues appeared to be abandoning its
consecutiveness in favour of much greater psychological immediacy and were
experimenting with ways of expressing inward irrational confusion in works that
deliberately left curiosity unsatisfied whatever else they did. Maugham’s faith
in the enduring power of traditional narrative did not let him down throughout
this revolution. But if he had the faith in his own art that moved mountains he
was not complacent about it. He was never content to rest assured; his
conservatism, his sense of literary tradition and social tradition, was
combined with tireless intellectual curiosity. He was continually extending his
scope even though he sometimes re-worked a plot he had used before: he never
wholly profited by the acquired élan.
[…]
Maugham’s whole
career was a masterpiece of literary strategy, planned and executed with
ruthless precision. He had an unerring way of finding subjects that although
not tied to topical events were of the moment and of great popular interest. He
sensed the zeitgeist and contributed to it from his own standpoint as a
story-teller. His offensives were brilliantly timed and so were his
withdrawals. Unlike his mentors in the theatre, Henry Arthur Jones and Pinero,
he bowed out at a time when his public would probably have welcome more even
though they misunderstood some of his last plays.
As he grew in
stature as an author he adopted the habit favoured by Monty and other
successful generals of chatting to the troops: the mature Maugham cultivated a
friendly working relation with his readers that became the constant feature of
his vast many-sided oeuvre. You can always tell one of his books in outward
appearance by the spiky wigwam, the emblem against the evil eye found by his
father in Morocco, that sits on the binding,[2]
and in inward appearance by the presence in the narrative of Maugham’s
professional self, a creature who is witty, courteous, gentlemanly,
commonsensical, sceptical, agnostic, hedonistic, totally absorbed in the
technique of his craft. Let us imagine that we are in the library of some great
Maugham collector such as Jerome Zipkin or Betram Alanson,[3]
one-time head of the San Francisco Stock Exchange’, who possess every one of
Maugham’s books in its first edition and that they are ranged sided by side
across the shelves. What an impressive sight it is! Such industry, such
dedication, such singleness of purpose! Lucky indeed the fellow-writer who can
gaze thereon without a creeping paralysis of guilt at the pitiful smallness of
his own output!
Here is Liza of Lambeth in her original green
cloth as she appeared in Fischer Unwin’s pseudonym library in 1897 and ranged
beside her are those early offspring whom the Master later disowned The Making of a Saint (1898), Orientations (1899), The Hero (1901); […] Mrs. Craddock (1902) next: eventually
she was awarded her place in the Collected Works. Then three more outcasts The Merry-Go-Round (1904), The Land of the Blessed Virgin earliest
of his travel books and first fruit of his lifelong infatuation with Spain, and
The Bishops Apron [sic] published by
Chapman and Hall in 1906, and then again in Newnes Sixpenny Novel Series in
1908, looking for all the world like a genuine housemaid’s novelette with an
artist’s impression of the aforesaid bishop among the illustrations. The Explorer (1907) and The Magician (1908), emphasize the young
writers [sic] regularity and persistence, also how long it is taking us to
reach familiar ground. At last with Of
Human Bondage (1915) we have arrived and here beside the British Heinemann
edition stands the American published by George H. Doran one day earlier in the
same year, thus establishing a transatlantic link that was to endure for the
next forty years. Next to them is the German edition of Bondage Dasselbe (Berlin 1930),
the French edition Servitude Humaine
(Paris 1937), the Swiss edition Der
Menschen Horigkeit [sic] (Zürich 1939) and the Spanish edition Servidumbre Humana (Barcelona 1945) plotting a representative
pattern of territorial expansion. Now the eye begins to skim rapidly over
titles that are household words The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930), The Razor’s Edge (1944) up to Then and Now (1946) and Catalina (1948) with which the novels
ended. In a separate section are the short stories that began with Orientations. […] It is not until 1921
that the next volume of stories appeared, it was The Trembling of a Leaf, after which came The Casuarina Tree (1926), Ashenden
or the British Agent (1928), Six
Stories Written in the First Person Singular (1931), Ah King (1933), Cosmopolitans
(1936), The Mixture as Before (1940),
Creatures of Circumstance (1947). The
ideal way to read Maugham’s stories is in this chronological sequence of book
publication rather than in the reshuffled order of Altogether, or the three hardback Collected[4]
volumes or the four paperback ones in which they were re-issued. Apart from the
print being bigger there is geographical unity in the original volumes and such
luxuries as the author’s prologues justifying his titles.
The plays
were first collected in six volumes in a shiny brown cloth in 1931 onwards
spanning the Master’s retirement from the theatre, volumes for which he wrote
prefaces of scintillating brilliance. […] Then there are such rarities as The Explorer, The Tenth Man, Loaves and Fishes, Landed Gentry in small red boards with lists of the original casts,
but afterwards repudiated.
In another
section are works of travel and autobiography – the former On a Chinese Screen (1922), The
Gentlemen in the Parlour [sic] (1930), Don
Fernando (1935) have all been combined in one volume in the Collected
edition[5]
and ought surely to be better known than they are. Then there are those crucial
books The Summing Up (1935 [sic:
1938]) and A Writer’s Notebook, and
books of literary causerie, Books and You
(1939 [sic: 1940]), Great Novelists and
Their Novels (1948), The Vagrant Mood
(1952), Points of View (1958). For
someone who often referred to himself as ‘but a story-teller’ he would seem to
have published a sizable amount of non-fiction.
A complete
Maugham collection will include not only his own books but those by other
people for which when he was eminent he wrote prefaces. They tell us much about
his interests and his circle. Here is the American Bridge
expert Charles H. Goren on The Art of
Bidding and here are the memoirs of the Aga Khan. Here are theatrical
memoirs by the matinée idols who contributed to his own success as a
playwright, Gladys Cooper and Charles Hawtrey, in which Maugham confessed that
there was no greater illusion than the naturalism of the theatre. Here is Doris
Arthur Jones, daughter of the dramatist, in whose What a Life! Maugham recalled the first hostess to take him up,
Mrs. George Stevens. Here are people whom later on he took up, people like
Louis Marlow, Noël Coward, Dorothy Parker, Edward Marsh, Peter Arno.[6]
[…]
It amused
Maugham to pretend that he was more or less ignored by serious critics during
his lifetime. In fact he received an inordinate amount of critical attention.
If you were to put all the reviews and articles devoted to his work in English
alone end to end they would stretch from Cap Ferrat to Los Angeles. A whole book has been published
by the Northern Illinois Press, in a series with the resounding title of
Annotated Secondary Bibliography Series on English Literature in Transition,
1880–1920, on Maugham, compiled and edited by Charles Sanders, which lists
critical references to Maugham from 1897 to 1968 and is still incomplete though
it remains an invaluable work of reference to any student of Maugham, and one
to which the present book is much indebted. So far there has been no Critical
Heritage volume on Maugham from Routledge but what amounts among other useful
things to an anthology of reviews of his plays may be found in the superbly
researched Theatrical Companion to
Maugham by Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson (1955). These two works
together with the fine scholarly bibliographies of Raymond Toole Stott – the
latest and most complete revision arrived just as this book was going to press[7]
– are the essential tools in any serious appraisal.
Books about Maugham range from the academic to
the scurrilous and by now occupy several sizable shelves of their own. With his
global audience and his portraits of English people all over the world Maugham
was a natural subject for university study abroad. Paul Dottin’s W. Somerset Maugham et Ses Romans appeared as long
ago as 1928. But North America has led the field in professional industry with
Richard Cordell and Klaus Jonas outstanding for their devotion to the subject
over many years; since Maugham’s death in 1965 they have been joined by M. K.
Naik and by a Canadian scholar Robert Lorin Calder whose Somerset Maugham and the Quest for Freedom (1972) pursued the theme
of its title with great erudition and posited real-life originals for several
of Maugham’s most famous characters.
[…]
This brings
me to the last shelf of all labelled rather ominously Family and Friends. Here
is Robin – the present Lord – Maugham’s Somerset
and All the Maughams (1965) which contains in addition to the author’s
recollections of his uncle a historical account of the rise and rise of the
Maugham family from modest beginnings, and here is Lord Maugham’s later
autobiography Escape from the Shadows
(1972), one of these being his uncle Willie. Next to this we see A Case of Human Bondage (1966) by Beverley Nichols with some rare
glimpses in print of Syrie Maugham, and containing a violent personal attack on
Nichol’s [sic] former mentor. Much more cheerfully there is Garson Kanin’s Remembering Mr. Maugham (1966). Mr.
Kanin did a very valuable thing. He Boswellized Maugham. Whenever he met him he
went away and wrote down exactly what Maugham had said. The result is one book
where we do hear the real voice of Maugham speaking about everything from form
in writing to royalty on the Riviera.
Another American Wilmon Menard tried to perform the same task in his The Two Worlds of Somerset Maugham
(1965) but here it is not at all clear when he is quoting from Maugham’s
published writing and when he is claiming to report Maugham’s conversation.
Still, Mr. Menard is informative about Maugham in the South Pacific.
The only
volume that appears to be missing from these bulging shelves is an official
biography, the equivalent of Ray on Thackeray, Johnson on Dickens, Baines on
Conrad. Whether there will ever be such a biography of Maugham I would not care
to predict but it is quite clear that he did not wish that there should ever be
one.
No one in the
history of literature was ever so determined to cover his tracks. Maugham
forbade any posthumous publication of his letters. The copyright of an author’s
letters is vested in his estate: this prohibition can be (and is being)
enforced.[8]
[…]
As an
omnivorous reader of literary biographies himself Maugham must have realized
what a superb full-scale Life he would have made; it would have spanned so much
late nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, beginning with the last years
of Queen Victoria, including the Boer War, the Edwardian age, the First World
War, the early rumblings of the Russian Revolution, the uneasy peace, the
British colonial administration in the Far East, and switching in the later
chapters to the world of the French Riviera before and after the Second World
War, to China, to Indo-China, to India, to New York, to South Carolina, to
Hollywood, to Japan… […] But Maugham wished to be judged only in his own terms
as a professional author not as a private individual. He wished for no more to
be revealed about himself posthumously than he had revealed already in his
lifetime. He had a great reluctance for the image of Maugham so carefully
planted and cultivated by him over more than fifty years of writing to be
altered or corrected or modified in any way however deftly it was done. One of
the difficulties – and hence one of the fascinations – of writing about Maugham
is to get past Maugham’s apparent self-detachment. Everything there is to say
about Maugham has (so it seems) already been said by Maugham himself. He
appears so open with the reader about the nature of the problem before us and
his own equipment for dealing with it that further comment seems superfluous.
If we wish to assess his place in literature or to point to the shortcomings of
his style we find that he has been there already and come up with an answer as
judicious as it is modest. He told us as much about his own life as would
enable us to follow his career as an author, and to understand the events that
had influenced that career. In The
Summing Up he combined one part autobiography with about six parts general
reflection rather like those marvellous martinis that Gerald Haxton used to mix
for him. The pithy and illuminating prefaces he wrote in his later years for
the Collected Edition of his works are rich in personal anecdote. What he
showed us on these occasions was a mask by no means unrelated to his ‘real’ or
private self but used to establish the character of a professional author who
was as much a creation of Maugham’s as any of his other characters. This
professional self was a creature of infinite good sense; he was a living
example of the Golden Mean of Aristotle in action: we know from books that have
been published by his intimates since his death that in fact the ‘real’ Maugham
was by contrast a creature of fluctuating extremes and like the rest of us
capable of behaving at times in a completely irrational and totally
indefensible way.
[…][9]
In his study
Maugham never became the malicious, gratuitously offensive man whom those he
snubbed recall, nor was he the twisted self-conscious stuttering individual,
warped by the consciousness that he was three-quarters queer and a quarter
normal, as he confessed to his nephew. In his study he was the humane and
courteous, the generous and fluent, the amusing and stimulating companion whom
those few fortunate people who had his confidence recall. In his study he was a
story-teller of genius, inheritor of the major literatures of the world and
mediator of their riches to the common reader. Then and only then can you say
of Maugham: Le style c’est l’homme même.
In reality
the two selves cannot always be so conveniently separated. Maugham could be
utterly charming to total strangers and sometimes we detect a rent of anger in
the damask robe. In his writing he often showed us how someone who has lived
hitherto by the light of reason fails to overcome a self-destroying passion:
self-mastery and the roads by which it may be attained or lost is a theme that
gives a kind of unity to everything Maugham ever wrote. In his own case it was
not so much a road as a flight of stairs that led him to his rooftop
writing-room at nine o’clock punctually every morning, the start of the sacred
hours before lunch spent religiously at his desk mastering all main literary
forms – novel, drama, short story, travelogue, essay; a lifetime of dedicated
effort in which he managed to excel in all that he attempted. There has never
been a more perfect ‘case’ than Maugham’s of success in the profession of
literature.
The nature
and the pattern of that success is my concern in this book. Because of the
ubiquitous presence of the Maugham figure in the work I cannot wholly ignore
biography. On the other hand it is not my intention to try to out-wit Maugham
by writing his life in spite of him. He has dealt me my cards which are his
published works; it is up to me to play them as best I can. In short what
follows is an appraisal in the form of a critical portrait. Its main lines are
chronological with a bit of dodging about in order to group together works of a
similar kind whose composition was separated in time.
[…]
Maugham used
sometimes to go to Cambridge
to visit his friend George Rylands at King’s and as he listened to Mr. Rylands
talking up a point about Shakespeare or Donne with his pupils he saw what he
had missed. But Maugham believed that it was never too late to do what you
wanted to do and he asked Mr. Rylands to give him a supervision. ‘It amused
him,’ Mr. Rylands writes, ‘to sit at my feet for academic instruction –
sometimes of course scoring off me in the event!... He loved to “draw” me
because I taught English Literature
and he was a great admirer of Shakespeare on whom he pretended I was an
authority and scholar (which I am not) and got me to compose an anthology for
his bedside book. We talked also of course about the theatre as I was a keen
amateur actor and director. But much time was spent happily dissecting our
friends and foes. He thought human beings very peculiar and contradictory and
absurd and lovable and ghastly; the fascination was perpetual. And although he
belonged to the fin de siècle
pessimist group in a way – Housman, Hardy, James Thompson, Gissing – his
cynicism was the relish or sharp sauce to his meat – to flesh and blood; not
the dish itself; more romantic than cynical indeed with a temptation to the
mystical. However you will have realized all this long long ago. His books tell
the whole story for the man who can read. He was always very good and
encouraging to me and I was deeply devoted to him – marvellously entertaining –
he loved to make one laugh aloud – he
loved to tease.’[10]
2. Orientations
[…]
The Hero (1901) is an early landmark in
Maugham. It is his first sustained attack on contemporary middle-class values
from within the framework of English society and it shows his remarkable
ability among his countrymen to mount the attack in a spirit of truly Gallic
concentration.
The family
who bore the brunt of this attack were gentry, but they were not very grand. To
penetrate more deeply into the English society to which they belonged Maugham
had to see it from the vantage-point of the Great House as so many of his
fellow English novelists had done. Like the courts of the medieval kings and
the palaces of the Renaissance princes, the English country house was a world
of autonomous rule in which a novelist such as Trollope could find an
inexhaustible concentration of the social, political and moral life of his
period. To the American expatriate Henry James, the House was the Garden of
Eden in which beneath the silken rustle of the ladies’ gowns, the intensely
private conversations and the nightly click of the billiard balls, the Fall of
Man was re-enacted. Maugham was never enamoured of the House like James and he
never discovered there the richness of a Trollope. He had from the first an
artistic wanderlust that made him impatient with its insularity. By the time he
began to write he saw it as already in decline. His most damning picture of it
is in the play Our Betters where it
has come under the opulent, energetic, adulterous sway of Lady Pearl Grayston
and her American compatriots who have bought themselves into London and taken it over. The House upon
which Maugham focused in his fiction at the turn of the century was a stately
Kentish pile called Court Leys.
[…]
Maugham shows
how easily Craddock can combine an essential inhumanity manifested in various
ways in his behaviour towards Bertha, and a hard blinding egoism, with his
assumption of the gentlemanly role in which he is so triumphantly successful.
To the world at large he is the perfect husband and an admirable master of
Court Leys: they take back all their reservations about him and elect him to
the town council. His respectability is complete. Only Miss Ley penetrates his
outward front; she is stricken with horror at his vulgar improvements
(gold-paint and lopped elms) to the old house. Several critics have pointed to
the shadow of Madame Bovary looming
over this novel and to be sure it has the same painful progression, beginning
with the steady corrosion of the marriage through the husband’s unawareness of
the wife’s inner nature, and moving with Maugham to the wife narrowly escaping
death as she gives birth to a still-born child, this last episode being most
authentically depicted by the former obstetric clerk of St. Thomas’s. We may
also wish to see Mrs. Craddock as a
horrible realistic refutation, a decade in advance as it were, of the novels of
D. H. Lawrence. Certainly Bertha obeyed the ‘wisdom of the blood’ when she
married beneath her in defiance of society but where did it get her? It seems
right that Craddock in a fit of arrogance should die in a riding accident at
the end of the book while Bertha recovers, goes abroad, takes a lover and ends
emotionally numbed and moribund with only her friendship with Miss Ley to
support her.
At this stage
in his career Maugham did not have the self-confidence to appear in his own
books in person; when he needed a reasoner to enunciate the truths of which the
antagonists seemed unaware he used Miss Ley. She became the axle of his next
book The Merry-Go-Round (1904) in
which he tried the experiment of linking together dramas involving separate
sets of people. […] However, Maugham’s book does have an organic unity of a
kind through his continued examination of the gentlemanly code as a guide to
right action in the relations between men and women belonging to the ruling
social class. He presents his examination dramatically, perhaps one should say
melodramatically, through a number of stock situations, such as the respectable
married woman who has to confess to her husband that she has a lover, the
gentlewoman who falls in love with a young poet of the humblest origins and
therefore socially unacceptable who is dying of TB. This situation also occurs
the other way round, with the gentleman who has an affair with a barmaid who
becomes pregnant by him; and then there is another unwanted pregnancy, that of
a gamekeeper’s daughter who thereby threatens the security of her entire family
because her father’s livelihood depends on the head of the estate whose
gentlemanly sense of propriety she has mortally offended. With a deterministic
pessimism Maugham shows how the code, which long ago had its origin in a great
counsel of forgiving, exacts the maximum cruelty on those who become
unwittingly caught up in its mechanical operation: each of the three main
liaisons comes to grief in either betrayal, early death or suicide; two young
women take their own lives, victims of masculine idealism; the only marriage
that shows any sign of being happy is between an upper-class blackguard and a
blowsy, level-headed, ungentlewomanly actress.
[…]
4. Limping Earnestly
[…]
A novel in
which the hero is really a portrait of the author may be read in different ways
at different times. The first readers read it for the story, later ones for the
autobiography. Maugham succeeds in Of
Human Bondage in integrating the two aspects to a point where they are
almost inseparable. He avoids mere self-indulgent reminiscence by the rigour of
his narrative method.
[…]
On one level
this [the clubfoot] is clearly analogous to Maugham’s stammer, on another to
that sense of apartness whose complex roots it was the purpose of the novel to
uncover. Philip’s vulnerability is a much more inward trait than anything we have
seen in a Maugham hero up to now. It does not make him very likeable, deeply as
we may sympathize with him in the cold climate of the vicarage. Maugham was not
prepared, any more than E. M. Forster was, to break all taboos. He did not
depict his sexual ambivalence, but with this large exception he was ruthlessly
honest, realizing that he would only exorcise the ghosts of the past by
dragging the ugly contradictions of his own nature into the light of day.
[…]
Then fate
intervenes; he catches scarlet fever; when he returns to school Rose has moved
in with someone else and the fellow-feeling with Philip has evaporated. His
vanity cannot accept this over-throw and in making a fuss he brings upon
himself the inevitable wounding appellation of ‘cripple’. In the fury of
enraged consciousness of self that this reversal brings about, his reaction is
the desperate one of cutting short his school career and abandoning his attempt
at a university scholarship. It is a frightening example of the wound mechanism
at work; even then it would not have come to anything after his anger had
cooled were it not that to uphold his decision becomes an irresistible
challenge to his will. His uncle the Vicar, one of the most richly depicted
comic characters in the whole of English fiction, a supreme study of an egoist,
opposes his nephew’s wishes in a particularly devious way. This so incenses him
that he works upon his aunt through whose intervention he manages to get both
his uncle and the headmaster to accept his plan to go to Heidelberg. This first
great triumph of will is poisoned by his knowledge that he has made a
disastrous mistake; yet his pride will not suffer him to change his mind. In
real life it was, as Maugham revealed in Looking
Back, part one, a bully of a form-master who showed hideous insensitivity
to his pupil’s stammer, that proved this psychological chain of cause and
effect that robbed Maugham of his Cambridge
education.
[…]
He meets on
his return to Blackstable a Miss Wilkinson, a rector’s daughter who has been to
Paris as a
governess. She boasts of an acquaintance with Daudet and Maupassant, plays him
airs from Massenet and lends him Murger. He becomes enamoured, not so much of
Miss Wilkinson, whose lover he in fact becomes, as of the whole romantic idea of
la vie de bohème, starving in a
garret in Paris.
At this point
I find it helpful to think of Maugham’s novel as a tale of two cities, the city
of grim necessity, of wearisome toil and incarceration within one of the most
class-conscious societies the world has ever known, which is London;
and the city of art, of the aesthetic life, of self-fulfilment and freedom
which is Paris.
That at least was how Philip saw it at this time and naturally he longed to
enter the latter while his uncle was determined that he should pursue some
regular, secure occupation in the former. Thus before the Parisian section of
the book begins Philip is packed off to London as an accountant’s articled
clerk and we hear a little menacing tune, a hint of things to come, that tells
of frustration, melanchonlia, genteel Gissingesque poverty and sense of social
ambivalence: Philip is too much of a gent for his fellow clerks and not enough
of one for his employer.
[…]
The Parisian
scenes of Of Human Bondage are a
corrective to those of Murger and du Maurier. Maugham shows us what bliss it
was to be alive in that dawn when everything was new under the sun but he tells
us too the price in term of blood, sweat and tears which has to be paid for the
artistic life both by those who possess original talent, painters like Clutton,
who owed a lot to Maugham’s friend the Irish artist Roderick O’Conor, and by
those who do not, such as the pathetic trier Fanny Price with whose suicide by
hanging this part of the novel melodramatically ends. In many of the great
personal portmanteau novels of the nineteenth century the intensity slackens
after the early childhood section, with its atrocities and consolations; the
pressure here is kept up with wonderfully consistent energy.
What is just
slightly puzzling is the time historically when it is all supposed to be
happening. If as we may suppose Philip was eighteen or nineteen, that puts it
at some time in the early 1890s, yet Maugham appears to be writing of a period
in which Impressionism was the latest thing in painting and in which the frank
sexuality of Manet’s Olympia was a revelation. Yet this splendid painting was
completed in 1863, creating a rumpus when it was exhibited two years later. It
had in fact been shown in the Salon in a retrospective exhibition of Manet’s
work in 1899, the year of his death. Manet would have been by then as much and
as little avant-garde as, say,
Jackson Pollock is now. […] Maugham has somehow telescoped about twenty years
of development from the Impressionists to the Fauves into a year or two with
the aim of revealing to us the radical change of taste and outlook suffered by
Philip when he crosses the Channel.
[…]
In spite of
her boyish torso what a capriciously feminine creature Mildred is!
[…]
When Mildred
seeks him out again, her baby has been born out of wedlock, V.D. has begun to
poison her flesh, and if her spirit remains unbroken, her condition is
desperate. […] Now the delicate balance of the relationship has changed. He has
become the dominant, she the dependant, a new form of bondage for him.
[…]
With the
appearance of Athelny, a mood of con brio
begins to predominate in the last movement, as it were, of this ornately
orchestrated novel.
[…]
In a final
Elgarian fortissimo Maugham gives us the personal idyll of the hop-picking, the
open fields and the contented workers who have momentarily escaped from the
enclosed prison of the city.
We know this
to be a fantasy and that at the historical moment when the novel ends the real
Philip Carey, far from marrying an earth-mother and becoming a G.P. in a safe
country practice, was embarking in unencumbered singleness of purpose upon one
of the most hazardous things a man could do in this life, to live by literature
alone. In the swelling pastoral chords we hear this theme, too, if we listen
closely. Philip Carey’s adult pattern was to be a conventional one
circumscribed by marriage and a job; Maugham’s was the eccentric one of the
literary artist, the curious traveller and the connoisseur of humankind. In
this ample novel both patterns are very fully sketched.
Had he only
produced Of Human Bondage Maugham
would be a much less important figure than he is, but it is nonetheless his
most important book and one that will bear a great deal of re-reading; what it
will not bear in my view is the kind of analysis that by intensive boring into
its surface tries to make a ‘strike’ of the author’s philosophy. If it has a
philosophy it is one of events rather than ideas. I have used the image of a
symphony to describe its shifting and blending moods of joy and sorrow but the
sister-art from which this novel draws its strength is in fact painting. It is
itself a most illuminating retrospective one-man show; as we patiently wander
through its rooms absorbing one rich full canvass after another we take in an
unforgettable series of impressions of what life was like at the end of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
[…]
The reviewers
were shaken by the immense scope and depth, the ambitiousness of the book, and
they tried to cover their confusion in easy generalities, in attacks on the
character of the hero, in complaints that it was not one novel but many, in
scorn for the pattern-in-the-carpet approach to moral values, and in quick
comparisons with other novelists such as Fielding, Arnold Bennett and Compton
Mackenzie.[11]
[…]
6. Mainly Heroines
[…]
The greatest
period of English drama, the Elizabethan and Jacobean, occurred before the
arrival on our stage of the actress and hence, with obvious exceptions we can
all think of, is weak in strong female roles. The realistic theatre attempted
to make up for this deficiency and no one can complain that the plays of Henry
Arthur Jones and Pinero lack good parts for women. They tend however to be
rather similar women – characters like Mrs. Dane, Mrs. Tanqueray, Mrs. Ebbsmith
lack individuality. They are femmes
fatales. It is more in what they represent for their menfolk in the way of
temptation than in what they are in themselves that their importance lies.
Maugham
etched his heroines with a sharper and subtler needle than his predecessors. He
was indeed God’s gift to the great actresses of his day and his success seems
inseparable, as he freely admitted, from such stars of the period as Irene
Vanbrugh, Gladys Cooper, Fay Compton, Margaret Bannerman and Flora Robson.
If Maugham
had shocking views about women, particularly as we have seen about what a
mistake it was for an artist, or anyone who wished to lead the creative life,
to become involved with them, this misogynistic attitude was combined with the
most remarkable empathy with the sex. Maugham understood women much better than
any other playwright of this period whether it was women of the political and
social aristocracy, the wives of the professional middle-class or the common
prostitute. He understood them much better than Shaw, for example, who merely
created new stereotypes of his own by giving women many of the qualities of
leadership and resourcefulness traditionally ascribed to men. Shaw devoted a
lot of wordage in his polemical plays to the plight of women and led the
crusade for their liberation from the domestic prison but it was Maugham who
dramatized the actual reality of their situation at the time when they achieved
their political and social independence.
Maugham
captured in all its most elusive forms that frightening new species –
twentieth-century woman. He peopled his stage with dissatisfied women,
heartless women, competitive women, masculine women, outrageous women,
self-sacrificing women, Anglo-American women and one mercy-killing maternal
woman.
[…]
Yet within The Circle there is an agreeable
geniality tempered by the wisdom of maturity. In spite of all the awfulnesses,
Maugham is saying, and all the degradations, if you do give up all for love,
the world is well lost. Bicker as
they must, Lady Kitty and Lord Porteous have an affection for each other that
in the end is indissoluble and that makes her want Elizabeth to bolt even
though she has put the case against doing so with such unanswerable force. The
head has its reasons and in the final moments of the comedy they prove to be
stronger than reason itself.[12]
The spectacle
of a woman attempting simultaneously to satisfy the demands of a lover and a
husband was standard fare in the French theatre ever since La Parisienne in 1885.[13]
In England
extra-marital affairs had to be hinted at rather than directly presented. Caroline
in The Unattainable had a husband who
was permanently absent and was therefore able to enjoy the devotion of the
leading barrister she had ensnared in a happy state of indefinite balk, as far
as ever marrying him went. A report of her husband’s death upsets this
equilibrium and provides Maugham with his basic situation for a comedy. He
shows us with a merry plausibility how as they look upon the wide ocean of
choice that has suddenly opened before them neither Robert nor Caroline wishes
to embark for the distant shore of marriage. His point is that these two people
are perfectly happy, as happy as any two human beings who have been exclusive
to each other for ten years can be expected to be, so long as they are not
required to enter into the marriage contract. […] The situation is teased out
beautifully in Maugham’s best nonchalant man-of-the-world manner and in the
course of it the motivations behind the institution of marriage are thoroughly
spelled out by Robert:
My
dear, I have a large experience of the reasons for which two people marry. They
marry from pique or from loneliness, or fear, for money, position or boredom; because
they can’t get out of it, or because their friends think it’ll be a good thing,
because no one has ever asked them before, or because they’re afraid of being
left on the shelf; but the one reason which infallibly leads to disaster is
when they marry because they want to.[14]
[…]
From Pearl
Grayson’s [sic] drawing-room at the hub of smart social London
[Our Betters] to the British Consular
Agency Residence in Cairo
of the Khedive was the leap that Maugham made in his next play. The
authenticity with which both these milieux are created is evidence of his acute
powers of observation at this time, but in Caesar’s
Wife he had a more ambitious aim than merely to observe an aspect of the
complicated chessboard of Middle East Politics. He wanted to show the nobility
of character in both men and women that had been so conspicuously absent from
his theatre up to now and to rebut the view that he only achieved his triumphs
by putting thoroughly unpleasant people on the stage. If marriage was a prison,
the sentence could be served with dignity.
[…]
As the female
pressures pile up on Little, one is reminded of that other sorely extended
administrator in foreign parts, Shakespeare’s Othello. But Little though perplexed in the extreme never loses his
cool and he is rewarded by the respect and loyalty of his wife after his life
has been preserved by none other than Ronny in a plot hatched by the emergent
nationalist, Osman Pasha.
One critic
found Little unattractively reptilian: but to me he remains a finely chiselled
figurehead of a class whom Maugham understood so well; he is the embodiment of
leadership, sinewy, shrewd, courageous, a believer in having it out at once and
a very accurate summer-up of a situation, a natural Tory who behaves with
openness and good breeding both to the fellers of the opposite camp and to the
people in his charge. Hear him as he utters some words of wisdom to a visiting
Labour M.P. who is about to make a journey up the Nile into Upper
Egypt:
You
may learn a good deal that will surprise you. You may learn that there are
races in the world that seem born to rule and races that seem born to serve;
that democracy is not a panacea for all the ills of mankind, but merely one
system of government like another, which hasn't had a long enough trial to make
it certain whether it is desirable or not; that freedom generally means the
power of the strong to oppress the weak, and that the wise statesman gives men
the illusion of it but not the substance – in short, a number of things which
must be very disturbing to the equilibrium of a Radical Member of Parliament.[15]
This is a
very rare instance of straight political utterance in the Maugham canon and it
is one which unfortunately time has not rendered either obsolete or irrelevant,
unlike some of those by his overtly political contemporaries, Shaw and Wells.
[…]
There was
nothing either mystical or metaphysical about this scintillating work [The Breadwinner]. It is a
straightforward comedy of ‘men’s lib.’ that still holds the stage today
whenever it is revived. […] The comedy received better reviews in England than it
did abroad even though objection was taken to the heartlessness of the
mercenary young people in the first section and particularly to the daughter’s
line about the market for prostitution being ruined by amateurs, which in later
performances had to be cut. Maugham’s scathing treatment of these youngsters
may be seen as his riposte to the bright young things of Noël Coward.
The actor,
William Fox, who appeared as one of them in the original production of The Breadwinner tells me that when
Maugham was approached to secure his agreement to the omission of a line or two
he said, ‘You’ve b-bought it. You can d-do what you like with it.’ Unlike some
playwrights Maugham was never stage-struck and unlike Anouilh, for instance, he
never put the theatre itself into his plays. One of the very few utterances
about the theatre on the stage does in fact come in this play when Battle’s daughter
confesses to him that she wants to be an actress. He tells her to be natural
and when she replies that that ought to be easy he goes on to say:
It
isn’t. It’s the result of infinite pains. It’s the final triumph of artifice. And
remember that society only looks upon you as a freak and the moment you’re out
of fashion drops you like a hot potato. Society has killed more good actors
than drink. It’s only your raw material. Let the footlights, at least
spiritually, always hold you aloof.[16]
This remark
is slightly out of context for Battle
and we may be sure that it represents the considered view of the author.
Certainly Maugham remained completely aloof from his public.
[…]
For Services Rendered is a perfect
illustration of Maugham’s favourite doctrine that suffering does not ennoble
but makes people bitter and ungenerous. On the surface all is serene in the
little world of Leonard Ardsley, respected solicitor in rural Kent; the not
so young people play their tennis and take their drinks while he sweats it out
in his office. Then Maugham proceeds to rip that surface to shreds; he summoned
the spirit of Strindberg to haunt the green pastures of English country house
comedy.
[…]
Agate’s
criticism that it did not seem proven that the war could be blamed for such a
concentration of ill-fortune among one Kentish circle does not appear nearly so
relevant now. The play was a much truer expression of its period than
contemporaries were prepared to admit.
It had a
disappointingly short run and Maugham said contemptuously afterwards that any
dramatist could see how by sentimentalizing it in a series of sugary happy
endings it could have been turned into a success. ‘But,’ he added, ‘it would
not have been the play I wished to write.’[17]
[…]
The mistakes [sic]
most critics made with Sheppey, which
did not have a very long run, was to see it as the tragedy of a saint, when in
fact it was the comedy of a philanthropist. True, Maugham followed Galsworthy’s
pattern in showing how the ingrained habit of crime is too strong for the thief
to be rehabilitated, and the tart to be happy away from the street, and that
Sheppey is betrayed by most of those closest to him, but the defects are in him
as much as in them. […] Only Charles Morgan of the overnight critics was on the
right tack; writing in The Times he
said:
Mr
Maugham has not written a play about a saint; he has written a play about the
world’s reluctance to part with its money, and has written it with fluency,
judgment and wit – with everything, indeed, except that supreme devotion that
might have exchanged success for a masterpiece.[18]
7. Bicycling Down
Joy Lane
[…]
The other
reward of the literary career in Maugham’s eyes is one that I have already
mentioned, catharsis. Maugham tries to show it in action, as it were, in Cakes and Ale. Unlike other mortals a
writer has the power to transmute the bitter dross of life’s miseries into the
pure gold of literary art. Throughout the book there are references to a major
novel of Driffield’s called The Cup of
Life that occupies the same place in Driffield’s oeuvre that Jude the Obscure does in Hardy’s. It has
a very harrowing scene in it, parallel to the Father Time episode, where a
child dies in hospital, and we are to suppose that this incident had an
original in life, based on the death of a son that Rosie had by Driffield.
(Could Maugham have known anything, or guessed anything, about Hardy’s wild
oats days in Dorset?) Rosie’s immediate
reaction to the death was to go Romanos with an old friend, eat a jolly good
meal and then make love. The whole thing is the locus classicus of Maugham’s view how an artist stores up the
wounds of life and then regurgitates them. Driffield ‘used’ the episode for his
book and Maugham makes several points that tell one a lot about his own
practice as a novelist: first, that Driffield guessed at Rosie’s behaviour and
got it right in essence but not in detail; second, that the episode was never
discussed or even referred to by either party; third, that Driffield behaved
afterwards with infinite kindness and tact; and fourth, that by objectifying
the incident in a novel he was released from it for ever. Maugham emphasises
what he was to reiterate often later that because he possesses this power of
self-absolution the writer is the only free man. Cakes and Ale is one of the wisest, wittiest and wickedest books ever
written about authorship.
[…]
Theatre is not a novel for the stage-struck.
It reflects accurately Maugham’s disillusioned aloofness from the theatre, but
the interesting thing about this aloofness is that it does not preclude a
passionately held belief in the theatre as a process of absolution. It is this
aspect of the novel, Julia’s creativity alongside her hypocrisy, that gives it
a significance more lasting than a dozen similar stories about sex-mad
actresses. Maugham analyses her skill at creating character in a passage where
one feels he is closely identifying with her:
She
was not aware that she deliberately observed people, but when she came to study
a new part vague recollections surged up in her from she knew not where, and
she found that she knew things about the character she was to represent that
she had had no inkling of. It helped her to think of someone she knew or even
someone she had seen in the street or at a party; she combined with this
recollection her own personality, and thus built up a character founded on fact
but enriched with her experience, her knowledge of technique and her amazing
magnetism… It often seemed to her that she was two persons, the actress, the
popular favourite, the best-dressed woman in London, and that was a shadow; and the woman
she was playing at night, and that was the substance.[19]
[…]
Like Maugham
Julia finds a compensation for the frustrations of a disorderly private life in
the creative act – we now see what Charles Battle meant when he advised his daughter,
who wanted to become an actress, to remain aloof behind the footlights – and
like Maugham, too, Julia remains highly competitive in her aloofness, as we
learn hilariously in the most famous passage in the novel when she steals the
scene from an up-and-coming young actress in the post-Pinero play Nowadays by waving a red scarf about during
all her most important lines. (This was supposed to be founded on an episode in
the career of Marie Tempest, but the same story has been told of half a dozen
famous actresses.) After all her sexual humiliations Julia ends the book a
happy woman: she makes a great intellectual discovery as she dines alone on a
juicy steak in the Berkeley grill after the performance; it is that when she
brings to life a fictitious character on the stage she has created something
more real than reality: ‘Thus Julia out of her own head framed anew the
platonic theory of ideas’ and thus she points the way to one of Maugham’s
future lines of speculation in both his fiction and his more personal writing.
[…]
8. Streaks of Yellow
[…]
In his plays,
which be it remembered were being written and produced concurrently with these
exotic tales throughout the 1920s, Maugham used comedy in its traditional role
of uncovering the basic assumptions of a society and putting forward
alternative ones in striking antitheses of character and attitude. In his short
stories he performs the same feat, even at times working on the same
antitheses. The degree to which drama and short story might be interchangeable may
be seen in the comparative ease [with] which he himself was able to adapt ‘The
Letter’ for the stage and others were able to make a vastly successful play out
of ‘Rain’. Both these stories have the same structure of a man and a woman
weakening under pressure until we peer into the inmost recesses of the soul,
the outward mask stripped away. In both it is the relentless pressure of a
person’s sexual energy that endangers the social mask. […] The short story has
the inestimable advantage over the novel that the whole span of time in which this
process occurs may be conveniently encompassed by the mind of the reader. In
the much longer form of the novel you live through a great deal of time but you
have difficulty at the end of it seeing the process as a single whole. Whereas
at the end of ‘The Yellow Streak’ we have in our minds an absolutely complete
picture of the pattern of Izzart’s degeneration, just as we do that of Cooper
in ‘The Outstation’, Leslie Crosbie in ‘The Letter’, Mackenzie’s in the story
which he gives his name[20],
Gallagher in ‘P. & O.’, Lawson’s in ‘The Pool’. […] The fact that in so
many of these stories degeneration begins through sexual contact with women of
the native population, or through an attempt to defy the rigid paternalistic code
of the white ruling administration, is not likely to endear Maugham to the
modern liberal-minded reader.[21]
[…]
It is
interesting that Maugham should share with Kipling and other popular writers of
his generation this contempt for the intellectual in the world of action. Is it
at heart a form of self-contempt? If he had gone into colonial service he would
have been like Alban, possessing many of the same accomplishments. When he
presents us with these simple character-equations, native blood = yellow streak,
literary and artistic sensitivity = yellow streak, Maugham emerges as an
absolutely typical member of his class and background, the archetypal old boy
from The King’s School, Canterbury, as it was in the bad old days of Of Human Bondage. The reassurance that
he gave to the prevailing climate of prejudice about categories of people may
explain some of his popularity. It was beyond Maugham’s imaginative scope to
show how a crippled literary intellectual may manifest more moral courage than
a games-playing bully, as E. M. Forster tried to do in The Longest Journey.[22]
[…]
She [Kitty in
the end of The Painted Veil] is thus
brought back into direct, daily contact with the man who was the cause of her
downfall and it is from this proximity that Kitty learns the bitterest lesson
of all: that passion may survive disillusion and that the moral sense, even
when it has been suddenly discovered, may be just as suddenly set aside when
temptation comes again. As the crow flies it is only thirty miles from the city
of Hong Kong to
the cholera town, but the distance between the Kitty who learned there new
freedom and the Kitty who yields slavishly once again to the Assistant
Commissioner is incalculable.
By giving his
story a title from Shelley, and an epigraph from Dante, Maugham was making a
claim for it as a serious work as well as hinting the source of the plot; but
its popular sensational form of torrid passion and tropical sun blinded many
reviewers to its depths of insight. The
Times Literary Supplement was splendidly Grundyish. ‘One may doubt,’ it
pontificated, ‘whether it is strictly necessary to the indictment of lust that
purely lustful episodes should be described so conscientiously.’ You can say
that again, in the 1970s. […] But for all the jibes The Painted Veil continued to be read. In 1931 Lytton Strachey, the
high priest of literary journalism, took it away to read while suffering from
‘flu and pronounced it ‘Class II, division I’; it is a useful coding when
thinking of Maugham by comparison with, say, Dostoievsky and Tolstoy – but what
about a more realistic comparison with a later novel of tropical sex, The Heart of the Matter? Here one would
be inclined to put Greene into Class I, division II and count Maugham’s the
less flawed work.
9. On the Judgment Seat
Do people
behave noticeably better when they are at home, or at leisure in a society
composed of their own kind, than when they set themselves up to govern native
peoples in exotic lands? If we are to judge from the stories that Maugham
published in the 1930s and 1940s in such volumes as First Person Singular (1931), The
Mixture as Before (1940) and Creatures
of Circumstance (1947), the short answer must be – ‘no.’ You
cannot of course make a strict chronological distinction between the far and
the near in the work of so fertile a writer. You will still in these books
encounter an odd D.O. from Borneo in an agonizing marital entanglement during a
spot of leave in London[23],
and the miniscule tales of Cosmopolitans
(1936) span both East and West. But from now on you will be sipping dry
martinis rather than gin pahits. You will swan around London,
Paris, the French Riviera, Seville,
Rhodes, Florence,
places where centuries of civilized living have left their mark.[24]
When Graham
Greene came to review Cosmopolitans[25]
he complained that the stories ‘had no echo of the general life’, being bounded
by ‘the liner routes and the leisured quarters’. Since he wrote that review Mr.
Greene has come to learn how much success isolates an author from the general
life, but is it really true, either of that volume, or of Maugham’s accidental
stories on the whole? As always he approached the general life through the
private and professional life; in others [sic] words, he focused so sharply
upon the particular that it came to have general application. A story such as Episode, in which a Brixton postman
steals money from the mail he is delivering to keep a girl cut above him
socially in the style to which her mean-minded mother thinks she ought to have
become accustomed, chissels through the wall that shuts out the atrocities of suburban
working-class life in the years between the war [sic] and shows us gradations
of snobbery as exclusive and destructive as anything to be found higher up in
the social scale. And Maugham moves up and down that scale in his stories with a
nimble agility. At the top are characters like Lord Mountdrago, the insolent
Tory politician, locked in a love-hate relation with his Labour opponent and at
the bottom the young man for whom the innocent Sunday pastime of kite-flying
became a way of discovering the distinction between being a son and being a
husband.[26]
Both this story and Episode came to Maugham from his friend
Alan Searle, who had had much experience in helping first offenders in Wormwood
Scrubs Prison, and who suggested the character of Ned Preston round whom the
tales are told. Would that Maugham had given us more of such stories for they
show him at his most compassionate. Mr. Searle told me that when he read Episode he was amazed at the accuracy
with which Maugham had depicted people he had never actually met. ‘I really
began to believe in inspiration,’ said Mr. Searle.
[…]
But though Maugham continued to play
by the old rules, the realistic rules of Maupassant, he realized that
literature is like everything else subject to fashion. He knew only too well
what happened to an artist when the public tired of him. Unlike some successful
authors he never took his popularity for granted. He may have pretended in
sardonic deference to a luke-warm review, that with each fresh volume of short
stories it was just ‘the mixture as before’,[27]
but in fact the mixture was always being changed to take in new places and
experience. Maugham’s most scathing story about the tyranny of fashion and of
public taste on those who aim to make their living by providing entertainment
is the one entitled Gigolo and Gogolette
[sic][28].
Although Maugham never consciously wrote anything with a hidden meaning, one
may, perhaps, be permitted to interpret this story, beneath its brilliant surface
realism depicting pre-war Riviera life, as a parable of the plight of the
professional writer, who with each new book at the behest of his publisher and
agent attempts the Dive of Death (through a burning hoop above a
swimming-pool). The fickle public watches while eating, hoping secretly that he
will come a cropper, but giving generous applause when he lands safely. One day
he meets the Human Cannon-ball (a best-selling novelists of two decades ago,
now totally forgotten, living meagerly off a beneficence provided by the Royal
Literary Fund). He sees a horrible vision of the future. No wonder, he thinks,
some of them sometimes lost their nerve.
[…]
Maugham’s most complex story and at
the same time one of the most amusing, about the emotion taken from life that
is transformed through artistic recreation, is The Voice of the Turtle[29].
There are three artists involved here: Maugham himself, a young novelist Peter
Melrose, to whom he is at first hostile but to whom he then warms to the extent
of inviting him to Cap Ferrat, and La Falterona, the diva. Melrose needs material about a prima donna
for his next book and Maugham provides it by inviting a real one to dinner. But
the character had already been sketched out and written up by Melrose before he met her. All that life does
in this instance is to confirm the artist in the truth of his fiction. What he
sees, Maugham implies satirically, is something very different from reality.
And yet when La Falterona reads the book she recognizes herself in it. Right at
the end of the story she sings privately to Maugham the liebstod [sic] from Tristan. Platonism takes over. Her
singing bodies forth an ideal reality. Maugham, conscious of her monstrous
everyday self, becomes nonetheless deeply touched. Did Maugham have an ear for
music? It is the art that appears least in his work but it is difficult to see
how someone who had no ear for music could have written either this story or the
one called The Alien Corn. Wagner
made a great impression on him as a young man and as a writer he turned to him
several times when he wanted an analogy for a love so pure and so great that it
sweeps aside everything in its path, as in The
Sacred Flame.[30]
[…]
10. Don
Guillermo and other Portraits of the Artist
[…]
Maugham was in his mid-sixties when
he published The Summing Up. He was
at the height of his powers and ready to stake his claim as a serious writer.
Rightly or wrongly he was conscious of never having read a just assessment of
himself from the critics. In a quiet, even-tempered, modest yet authoritative
tone he offers a self-assessment. It is a masterpiece of a kind rare in
English, a self-portrait that contains an investigation of literature as a
craft whose principles may be formulated and argued about. I once wrote to
Evelyn Waugh asking him if he would care to comment on an interview with a
distinguished fellow novelist that we had printed in the Sunday newspaper by
which I was employed at the time and I received the following reply: ‘I am
sorry to say that it does not provoke comment and I am too old and too English to
want to expatiate my views on fiction.’[31]
Maugham suffered neither from such premature senility nor from such native
reticence. He was continental enough to enjoy the causerie, and with more than forty years of published work behind
him, he was ready to take the reader into his confidence, and to tell him about
the trials and tribulations as well as the rewards and joys of the trade.
[…]
The Summing
Up is a
book to be read and re-read rather than read about. I have never met anyone
who, once having read it, did not admire it, and I have heard many people say
it is Maugham’s best book. It certainly makes the view that some still hold, that
Maugham succeeded as a story-teller by means of a superficial cynicism instead
of a mature attitude to life, seem hopelessly out of touch. Combined with the
story-teller was the brilliantly original self-taught thinker and critic, a
formidable example of that literary type we sometimes call in English a sage, who
begins to show himself fully in Don
Fernando for the first time, and now has a free rein to give us his mature
reflections on all the main literary forms he has used and on the language he
has striven so hard to make a delicate instrument at the service of his subtle
play of mind.
[…]
11. At Work
in the States
[…]
It is a common phenomena [sic] for
the novelist who has excelled in the realistic depiction of contemporary life
to seek a kind of creative sanctuary in a work of historical fiction at the end
of his career: Gissing’s Veranilda and
Waugh’s Helena, both favourite works
of their authors and largely disregarded by their admirers, come to mind. These
last novels of Maugham’s [Then and Now &
Catalina] are best seen as part of
his vagrant mood, his wanderings in history and literature and resuscitation of
real people who had played some exceptional part in their periods, with whom he
found the same understanding to the point of identification as he had with the
Stricklands and the Larrys of his fiction. In life Maugham had always been
fascinated by ruthlessness and singleness of purpose, by a combination of
charm, authority, cruelty, shrewdness and gambler’s courage. He found a
combination of all these qualities in the figures of Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia
during the three months or so in 1502, the period of the Duke’s most
sensational and bloodthirsty coup, when the future author of The Prince was in close contact with him
in the town of Imola from which he was conducting his military and diplomatic
operations.
This is the setting of Then and Now in which Maugham applies
the novelist’s powers of invention to constructing an amorous intrigue for
Machiavelli with a young wife at Imola, conducted in the interstices of
political negotiation. The quick-change from matters of great political moment
to the hazards of the bedchamber, from the world of Mandragola to that of The
Prince, provides the alternating current for the book and takes some time
to get switched on. Maugham has a complicated set of historical circumstances,
involving the whole of the Romagna, the position of the King of France, the
Pope and especially the city of Florence, to put before the reader in his first
few chapters, and as Edmund Wilson pointed out in his devastating review The Apotheosis of Somerset Maugham, he
makes rather heavy weather of it. However, even Wilson had to admit that once the narrative
gets under way its hold is considerable.[32]
[…]
He calls Catalina a romance; and it is a less complicated operation than Then and Now but every inch as much the
product of a mind so soaked in the period that it moves with ease among both
political and domestic events. We saw in Don
Fernando how Maugham relished the contrasts of Spanish life in its great
age. He finds now what had hitherto eluded him, a single human being upon whom
all the various pressures of the time, religious, military, literary, political
and so on, can be seen to operate.
[…]
The reviews of the story were largely
unsympathetic to what was and remains the charming product of a still lively
imagination.
12. Pantheon
[…]
Two things happened to Maugham after
the war: he became a legend and he became an essayist. To those under the spell
of the legend the Villa became a point of pilgrimage in the revived Riviera, or if not quite
that an object of veneration from afar, a symbol of the rewards of success in
literature as a career.
[…]
By all accounts he was an amusing and
engrossing talker: a pity no one ever tape-recorded him speaking off-the-cuff.
If at times he was malicious he was also searingly honest. His stammer only
served to enhance the irony and polished acerbity of his discourse. So much is
clear from the written records kept by Mr. Kanin and others. I never heard him
but I have a notion, to use a Maugham phrase, that his table-talk was
remarkable above all for three things: his power of hooking you on an anecdote,
his dispassionate dissection of the personalities of his friends, and his
unending absorption in the process of artistic creation. Happily it is this
side of Maugham, applying his fine, shrewd, commonsensical mind to people and
to books, that we are able to enjoy in the main work he did after the war, the
essays that were collected in such volumes as Ten Novelists and Their Novels (1945), The Writer’s Point of View (1951), The Vagrant Mood (1952), Points
of View (1958) and in the single volume of A Writer’s Notebook (1949), which was all that he allowed to
survive of the fifteen volumes of the original, and in the various lectures,
prefaces and introductions.[33]
[…]
After its strong biographical opening
the Kant essay [“Reflections on a Certain Book”] seems to me to be one of
Maugham’s rare failures. It is not often that we watch Maugham tying himself up
into knots and failing to extricate himself, but the latter part of this essay
is one of those strange occasions.[34]
[…]
Maugham often said that an author has
the right to be judged by his best work. It amused him when he was writing his
own obituary, which in a sense he did several times, on what that best work
was. He believed that he had written a few short stories and one or two plays
that would live as long as the language, his ‘baggage for eternity’, he called it
whimsically.[35] I suppose that at the end
of a critical portrait in which I have tried to present to the reader Maugham’s
work as a unity, and to show its relation to the different periods through
which he lived, I should open his baggage, and like some critical douanier see what he has to declare,
before he catches the celestial airport omnibus to that grande corniche from which no tourist returns. The list would not
contain any shock inclusions or omissions. Among the novels I should put Of Human Bondage firmly and obviously at
the head as his major achievement, a novel that is both highly individual and
yet part of a continuing tradition, then would come The Moon and Sixpence in which he worked out so memorably that
artist-gentleman dilemma which in his own life he never succeeded in resolving;
then Cakes and Ale for its withering
view of the literary reputation-makers at work, blended with its nostalgic
evocation of Edwardian Whitstable like sweet and sour pork; and The Razor’s Edge for Elliot and for
Larry and for Paris. The plays? I accept the majority opinion that The Circle is his most perfect comedy
but there are at least half a dozen other pieces that I want to see as part of
a national repertory: some are middle period like Our Betters and Caesar’s Wife
and others are late like For Services
Rendered and Sheppey. And if I
were to make a list of all the stories I want to re-read, starting with The Book-Bag and The Round Dozen, I should be compiling another bibliography: in
fact I should want to include volumes
of short stories: The Trembling of a Leaf,
Ah King, Ashenden, First Person
Singular. And I most certainly would not want to let him get away without
the essays: Don Fernando, the Notebook, The Summing Up… No, it’s no good. The essential Maugham is Maugham.
[…]
Maugham self-consciously avoided the
higher ground but it is a region which no lover of literature wishes to inhabit
all the time. The air is too thin on those heights, breathing is difficult, the
cold is intense, the whole expedition not to be undertaken lightly. I have
ascended the North Face of Henry James, and the Annapurna of Proust, and I have
been greatly exhilarated by the conquest of these great mountains, planting
here and there my puny flags of understanding. The views from the summit are
among my most cherished memories. But I cannot live there permanently. I come
back to the open, green, cultivated lowlands of Maugham. I wonder there happily
until it is time to set out on the next hazardous ascent of Mount Tolstoy
or Mount Dostoievsky. Maugham is where I live. He
continually delights me by his insights into the literary life and he
frequently astounds me by a skill so fine that it seems to me to be the most
perfect expression of the art of narrative in our literature.
[1]
The endnote reads: “Edmund Wilson’s review of Then and Now appeared as “Somerset Maugham and an Antidote” in The New Yorker of June 8, 1946 and was
reprinted as “The Apotheosis of Somerset Maugham” in Classics and Commercials, 1950.” This is slightly inaccurate. The
piece was not just reprinted; it was also revised. The famous description of Maugham
as a "...half-trashy novelist, who writes badly, but is patronized by
half-serious readers, who do not care much about writing" occurs only in
the revised version. Apparently it was a brilliant afterthought. The original
version is reprinted in The Critical
Heritage, Routledge, 1987, eds. Anthony Curtis and John Whitehead.
[2]
Mr Curtis invites us to check chapter VII of The Summing Up for Maugham’s own account how the “spiky wigwam”
became his symbol and rightly laments that the most recent Penguin edition of
the book doesn’t have it on the cover; he probably means the 1971
edition, but one has to admit the missing symbol is the least cause of
complain!
[3]
At the time of writing the Alanson collection was in the University
of Stanford, the Zipkin one in the University of Texas; for all I know, they still are.
[4]
Mr Curtis’ advice to read the original collections is priceless. But he is not
quite accurate that “the three hardback” volumes, no doubt the ones published
by Heinemann in 1951, are “Collected”. Their title is “The Complete Short
Stories of W. Somerset Maugham”. The four paperbacks first published by Penguin
in 1963 and later reprinted (and indeed still in print!) are “Collected”. Altogether, it might be mentioned, is
the British edition of East and West
(1934), a massive collection that collects Maugham’s first five of his mature
collections and benefits from a long preface written especially for this
edition.
[5]
Not quite. The travel books were published separately in The Collected Edition
between 1935 and 1937. They were collected in one volume only in 1955 as part
of another edition that also included, uniformly bound, The Complete Short Stories (1951, 3 vols.), The Collected Plays (1952, 3 vols.), The Selected Novels (1953, 3 vols.), and The Partial View (1954, The
Summing Up and A Writer’s Notebook
in one volume).
[6]
All this material has since been collected by John Whitehead in A Traveller in
Romance, Clarkson N. Potter, 1984.
[8]
In the late 1970s and again some 30 years later, Maugham’s literary executors
betrayed his trust by allowing Ted and Selina to use his letters in their
biographies. Surprisingly or not, his correspondence reveals nothing we don’t
know from his published writings.
[9]
Here follow a completely unnecessary reference to Maugham’s senility during the
“last five years” of his life (the figure is debatable) and a quote from the
essay “After Reading Burke” about the author’s divided self as exemplified by
Machiavelli and especially Burke, concluding that the famous dictum “the style
is the man” should be applied to the personalities that emerge from the writing
study, not from the observations, however shrewd, of friends and the like.
[10]
“George Rylands in a letter to the author, March 21, 1972.”
[11] A
little later Mr Curtis quotes from the review by Gerald Gould in the New
Statesman in September and remarks: “These are the words of a man who has not
recovered yet from the uncommon candour of the novel…”
[12] This interpretation is too simplistic.
The play is darker and more complex. As Lady Kitty observes: “My dear Clive, I
don't mind telling you that if I had my time over again I should be unfaithful
to you, but I should not leave you.”
[14] “Caroline, Act II. The play was
originally called, and published under the titled of, The Unattainable.”
[15] “Caesar’s Wife, Act I.”
[16] “The Breadwinner, Act III.”
[17]
Mr Curtis correctly sources this from the preface to the last, sixth volume to The Plays of Somerset Maugham,
Heinemann, 1934 (reprinted in 1952 as The
Collected Plays, 3 vols.). The full passage is as follows:
Any
dramatist will see how easily the changes could have been made. The characters
had only to be sentimentalised a little to affect their behaviour at the
crucial moments of the play and everything might have ended happily. The
audience could have walked out of the theatre feeling that war was a very
unfortunate business, but that notwithstanding God was in his heaven and all
was right with the world; there was nothing to flash oneself about and haddock
a la crème and a dance would finish the evening very nicely. But it would not
have been the play I wished to write.
By the way, For Services
Rendered didn’t do so badly. The premiere lasted for 78 performances. See
Mander & Mitchenson, A Theatrical
Companion to Maugham, Rockliff, 1955, p. 220.
[18] “The
Times, September 15, 1933.”
[20]
Mr Curtis presumably meant “Mackintosh”.
[21] So
much the worse for “the modern liberal-minded reader”!
[22]
These “character equations” are nothing but gross oversimplifications. It is
truly lamentable that Mr Curtis, of all people, should stoop so low. Izzard may
have the yellow streak all right, but the same certainly can’t be said of
Norman Grange from “Flotsam and Jetsam”. Both have some native blood. The
character of Alban Torel is much more complex. He may turn yellow when it comes
to quell a Chinese rebellion, but he shows enough courage to have his lunch at
the club when he’s just been sacked for cowardice. Even the governor is
impressed enough to remark: “Courage is a queer thing. I would rather have shot
myself than go to the club just then and face all those fellows.”
So let’s take it easy with the character equations, shall we,
Tony? The limitations of the short story are not license to misrepresent it.
The author at least admits that “The Fall of Edward Barnard” is the one
exception “in these exotic tales when Maugham finds this power, to break with
the inherited code and makes one’s own law, in a person of culture and
sensibility”. I’m not sure this is the only case and I don’t think “bookish
yellow-streakers” suited Maugham’s aim in his exotic tales.
[23]
Mr Curtis probably means “Virtue” from First
Person Singular.
[24]
To these locations one is tempted to add Capri (“The Lotus Eater”), the Asia Minor (“In a Strange Land”), Vera Cruz (“The Bum”)
and St Laurent de Maroni (“A Man with a Conscience”, “An Official Position”).
By no means in all these places “centuries of civilized living have left their
mark.”
[25] “Spectator, April 17, 1936. S.1197.”
[26]
“The two ‘Ned Preston’ stories ‘Episode’ and ‘The Kite’ are the last two
stories in Creatures of Circumstance
(1947).”
[27] See the original Foreword to The Mixture as Before (1940).
[28]
“Included in The Mixture as Before
(1940). Made into a film [and ruined, one might add] as part of Encore (1951) with screenplay by Eric
Ambler.”
[29]
“Included in The Mixture as Before
(1940).”
[30]
Even though Mr Curtis is correct that music is the least prominent of all arts
in Maugham’s writings, perhaps one is justified to expect a treatment slightly
less perfunctory. An attempt for something like that has been made here.
The reference to The Sacred Flame is
a fine touch, though. Stella and her brother-in-law, be it remembered, attend a
performance of Tristan und Isolde.
This is an almost Wagnerian use of the leitmotiv technique in literature. It
anticipates the action. It tells us that there is something more between Stella
and her brother-in-law long before it is made clear in the text.
[31]
“Evelyn Waugh to the author, October 7, 1961. The fellow novelist was Richard
Hughes interviewed in The Sunday
Telegraph about the forthcoming The
Fox in the Attic.”
[32] “For my own part, I feel that Shakespeare
should not be judged on the basis of Cymbeline
nor Maugham on the basis of Then and Now.”
(Garson Kanin, Remembering Mr. Maugham,
Atheneum, 1966, p. 265.)
[33]
Tony’s sloppiness in this paragraph passes belief! “Ten Novelists and Their
Novels” does not exist. He evidently confused the first version of this book, Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948),
with the revised and expanded edition, Ten Novels and
Their Authors (1954), neither of which was published in 1945, of
course. The Writer’s
Point of View is not a volume of essays but a single lecture published
in pamphlet form (CUP, 1951).
[34]
Complete nonsense! The complete essay may be consulted here.
[35]
I’d like to know where this comes from. The only “obituary” of himself I can
think of is in the postscript of A
Writer’s Notebook, dated 1944. It is rather different than Tony’s version:
I
think that one or two of my comedies may retain for some time a kind of pale
life, for they are written in the tradition of English comedy and on that
account may find a place in the long line that began with the Restoration
dramatists and in the plays of Noel Coward continues to please. It may be that
they will secure me a line or two in the histories of the English theatre. I
think a few of my best stories will find their way into anthologies for a good
many years to come if only because some of them deal with circumstances and
places to which the passage of time and growth of civilisation will give a
romantic glamour. This is slender baggage, two or three plays and a dozen short
stories, with which to set out on a journey to the future, but it is better
than nothing. And if I am mistaken and I am forgotten a month after my death I
shall know nothing about it.
