William Somerset Maugham

Irish Jesuit Province

William Somerset MaughamAuthor(s): Alexander BoyleSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 77, No. 914 (Aug., 1949), pp. 371-380Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20516035 .

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WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM By ALEXANDER BOYLE.

IT is common knowledge that the events which influence the child hood of authors affect their later life and output. An unhappy

home imparts a touch of the abnormnal to the child's

attitude to life which helps to explain many a later idiosyncrasy

of philosophy and style. Dickens and the blacking factory, Kipling and

his hated aunt, Kafka and his father, Baudelaire and his stepfather,

Joyce the eldest son, old enough to witness the progressive deteriora tion in the family fortunes-these are but a few examples of how a

writer may be influenced by unhappiness in the home. Then there are

those for whom home life can scarcely be said to have existed, for

whom not all the efforts of well-meaning guardians could take the place of a mother's smile. Edgar Allan Poe lost both parents at an

early age. Somerset Maugham's mother died when he was eight, and

his father when he was ten.

The list could be considerably extended. Without going so far as to

maintain that no one can be a successful writer who has spent a happy

and normal childhood, one can perhaps agree that if a child is to be a

creative artist in later life, the kind of art he produces will be greatly

influenced by the kind of home in which he was reared. If that home

is abnormal, the abnormality will tend to appear in his work. In the

case of those who have been orphaned and are not happy with their

foster-parents, abnormality may be early and radical. Such children, when they are old enough to express themselves as

artists, will tend to autobiography, no matter what the medium is in

which they choose to work. Life and people will appear to them as

they judged them in early youth, and such judgments may never be

altered. Although Maugham's first book, Liza of Lanmbetli, does not

appear to conform to this pattern, it seems to have been rather a set

exercise from a model than the expression of a native attitude to life.

Certainly, in a writing career extending almost continuously over half

a century, neither the low-life characters nor the low-life argot of this

book reappear to any extent: at any rate to the extent of a full-length

novel. It is to his next book we should look, the rejected manuscript

from which he later wrote Of Human Bondage. Although we know

that Of Human Bondage was written many years later, we also know

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chat it was developed from that earlier manuscript which, by its refusal at the hands of the publishers (a fate that befell others from his pen at this period), helped to turn Maugham to writing for the stage.

I

However, successful playwright though he became, Maugham came back to his early love, and has remained faithful to it ever since. Perhaps the reason is not far to seek. When a man is poor, he will turn

his hand to many things. The fact that they are successful will mean little to him. He will still dream of doing the things he would have

done twenty years earlier, if he had had the money. Maugham was

successful. He still dreamed of the things he had meant to do, and

especially the scenes he had lived through, when he was a young man

in London. It may be conceded that he had something to write about.

He had been rendered an orphan, at an age when he could both

feel, and remember for later life, just what that meant to him. His

guardian had dangled before him successive professions-the Church, the Law, Chartered Accountancy, painting (a concession to his deli cate state of health) and, lastly, Medicine. He appeared settled for life

when he passed his finals. The next thing this unaccountable young man did was to throw up his career-he has never practised since

-and devote himself to writing on the strength of having his first

novel accepted. The second manuscript, as we have seen, was auto

biographical, and that is the note, heightened by the maturity of the

intervening years, of its direct descendant Of Human Bondage. Philip, its hero, has a club-foot. True, Maugham had no club-foot, but he

had hereditary tuberculosis. Philip is an orphan: so was Maugham.

Philip has a guardian, so had Maugham. Both went to the same type

of school, a kind of preparatory school for those wishing to become

Anglican clergymen. And so on. The author has told us himself how

the ideas and thoughts of this period of his life, though repressed by

the hard necessity of making his livelihood in another medium, came

to the surface later and gave him no peace until they were written

down. At first glance we do not seem to be dealing with an autobiography.

The first person singular (so noted a phenomenon in Maugham's later

style; though used more subtly than in its common use for personal

narrative) is absent. Except in so far as any novel dealing with cir

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SOMERSET MAUGHAM

cumstances familiar to the author must bear some, record of what he

has experienced among them, one would not ascribe to it on first read ing such fidelity of detail as is demanded by autobiography. For one thing, the club-foot puts one off. One takes it for granted that no one

with a club-foot will mention it unless he has to. The club-foot is a skilful piece of legerdemain. When the conjuror shows you something. it is because he has something else to hide. Later, when the book

was to surprise even Maugham himself by its popularity, especially among the critics, he proclaimed the connection between Philip and himself, with the usual warning that every incident is not to be taken literally. The warning is superfluous. The chief interest of the book is not in its incidents, but in its attitude to life. It is that attitude to

life that Maugham has spent the next thirty years of his life in elabora

ting in scores of short stories and full-length novels. It is. an attitude

to life which you do not find explicidy stated in his only personal record The Summing Up. The reason is obvious. When he clutters up page after page of this book with literary and artistic criticism (some

of it interesting, much of it dull, and all of it written in his own brand

of impeccable English), it is again the old trick of the club-foot. Here, he says, let me tell you what I think about Art and Literature: and

there follows page after page of his views on the problems of xsthetics and even-mirabile! -of philosophy.

Here and there, however, are scattered, like raisins in the pudding of a niggardly cook, a few autobiographical details, to keep us, as it

were, from yawning and closing the volume altogether. One is, perhaps, unintentionally revealing. We learn that, when a boy in

Paris, he was taught his English lessons by the Anglican clergyman.

of the Embassy Church through the medium of the Police Court news.

One recalls the effect on Miss Lehr in The Power and the Glory of

her first introduction to this kind of reading:

"So I thought I'd buy a paper-any paper: the news is just the

same. But when I opened it-it was called something like Police

News. I never knew such dreadful things were printed. I think

it was the most dreadful thing that's ever happened to me. It . . .

well, it opened my eyes."

If it opened Miss Lehr's eyes, it seems to have closed Mauigham's

to any other type of experience. From the long and steady record

of murder, sudden death, and all kinds of. sexual irregularities which form the bare bones of his stories, it would appear

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that the boy leamed a lesson then that the man was never after wards to forget. In fact, one might say that he never leamed any other, and that it is a child's view of human nature with which

we are presented in these incredibly neat and beautifully written stories, where charity is rewarded with treachery and respectability is a cloak for the most hypocritical vices: where no married persons are faithful unless they are fools or so unprepossessing that no one will look at them: where only the cheat has any honour, the adul terer any charity or the murderer any bravery.

In Of Human Bondage we have nearly all the motifs that reappear in the later Maugham. The minister of religion is dull, pompous and a monster of egotism. Religion is a wet blanket on the ardent spirits of youth; once rid of it one can really begin to live. The only thing in the modern world a man can properly live and* die for, preferably in circumstances of extreme squalor, is Art. Love is something you can do nothing about.

cIt [the sexual instinct] was irresistible, the mind could not battle with it; friendship, gratitude, interest had no power beside it."

Philip is deceived time and time again by Mildred. He is the proto type of all the fools in the later stories who trust and forgive their faithless wives, just as she in turn foreshadows all the women who trick their husbands or humiliate themselves before their lovers.

If one reads the story carefully one realises that it is love that is

its theme from the first tentative experience of Philip with Miss Wilkinson to the final solution (so far as anything can be final in such

a world) in the arms of Sally. Only it is not love in any Christian

sense. As portrayed in its effects by Maugham, it is remarkably like the vice of lust. It should not be forgotten that a vice is something that lasts for some time. It is not a momentary thing. It becomes

rooted in the character and increasingly difficult to remove with the passage of time. With Maugham the time element is important. Only

in the passage of time is there any hope. He is peculiar in that, un

like Christians, he does not consider the habit-forming side of a vice,

and, unlike most moderns, he is interested not so much in the brief

passion of an affair as in an attraction between man and woman

which he treats almost as a disease that has to run its course. One

is helpless while the illness lasts. One can do nothing. The fever

must run its course. The victim will recover: but, in the interval,

while the fit is on him, one must be careful to leave no sharp knives

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about or someone will get hurt: and it is almost an inevitable part of

these stories that someone does get hurt. There is something clinical about all this. Maugham seems to have studied the emotions of his patients as well as their illnesses when he was a medical student in the East End of London. One of these he has diagnosed-causes, symptoms, course of treatment to be followed, after-care (if any) and called it Love. He has seen no reason to alter his treatment in

fifty years. One feels he did well not to set up in practice as a doctor.

Such invincible ignorance and self-assured conservatism pay doubt less better in the realm of fiction.

'That this is no exaggerated view is clear from a quotatidf. In The Moon and Sixpence, the narrator (the "T " of so many of the stories) says:

"I suppose that art is the manifestation of the sexual instinct. It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and

the Entombment of Titian."

The mention of the first person singular, in which so many of the stories are told, leads us to consider this device of the novelist's technique. As used by Maugham it removes the narrator from too close a connection with the universe in which the principal characters live and move, an aim pursued on occasion by other writers as well. Thus, Henry James and Conrad sanction a usage by which, it has been said, " the story can be told with the effect of conversational

ease and with a wealth of detail otherwise impossible: we see the

incidents, as it were, coming to life, beating themselves out in his mind as it discovers and illuminates truth."

The last is the operative word. If this method is a powerful

weapon for the propagation of truth, it is equally powerful for the propagation of error. Maugham's view of life is essentially highly coloured, biased and lopsided. That it should be presented with all the charm of a master of storytelling is only another of the unfor

tunate influences from which modern English fiction is suffering. It is, of course, a commonplace, remarked on by the author himself, that

Maugham is hardly ever mentioned by any critic of repute. It is

inconceivable, for instance, that he should find a place in any book

dealing purely with literary criticism alongside James Joyce. Yet, for 375



IRISHI MONTHLY

every reader of Joyce there are hundreds who have read a story by

Somerset Maugham. Perhaps the most telling feature of such a technique

is this. In the ordinary story told in the first person the nalrator is usually one of many people influenced by a like environment. Nearly always, indeed, he is the "'hero "-i.e., he is influenced for good or

ill, but to a greater extent, by the same surroundings and events as

the rest of the characters. If they have certain moral qualities he is

apt to display the same in a greater or less degree. Not so the " ideal

spectator," who is merely a person with a sensitive faculty of appre

ciation, whom chance at various times brings into contact with the characters, over whom he has little or no influence. Thus, in

Maugham's stories there is .usually something dilettante, not to say

faintly ridiculous, about his ideal spectator-for instance, the " I "

of Cakes and Ale or The Razor's Edge. This is quite deliberate: for in this way he can describe his characters as the usual collection of

fools, rogues and charlatans who people the pages of a Maugham

novel.. The personal veracity of the narrator is not thereby impaired.

He is not one of them. He is the man from Mars, calmly surveying

the human scene and, by implication, free from the imperfections he ascribes to nearly all his characters. The method is subtle: the effect

stupendous. There is a Defoe-like atmosphere of the most scrupulous veracity about a Maugham tale that makes the ending come as a real

jolt. We put down the book and look across the room at our friends.

We reflect that it was thus that the story began-the same innocent

atmosphere, a firelit room, one or two ordinary people talking

trivialities over a tea-table. But before it ends there have been in

fidelities and betrayals, suicides and murders enough to furnish the plot for an Elizabethan tragedy.

There we have the word. For Maugham, life is a tragedy, but it

is a tragedy shorn of its hero. Here we shall find no Lear defying

the storm, no Crusoe,tang the savagery of Nature by his genius

for the matter pf fact. Instead we gaze through the limpid

medium of one of the cleverest of living prose-writers at a

simian world of treachery, stupidity and lust, where the rare examples of courage or fidelity that do appear are inevitably to be found among

the heartless and the cruel, where the " good " are always weak and

the forgiving of an unbelievable stupidity.

'Tere is an illuminating remark by Maugham in the preface he

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wrote to Altogether, a collection of some thirty short stories published between 1919 and 1931. He is discussing the influence on the modem short story of de Maupassant and Chekhov, the former of whom he claims as his master on the technical side. He says:

" One [de Maupassant] was content to look on the flesh, while the

other, more nobly and subtly, surveyed the spirit: but they agreed that life was tedious and insignificant and that men were base, un intelligent and pitiful."

One cannot read very much of Somerset Maugham without dis covering that he is of the same opinion. One recalls the dreadful vision of Philip in Of Human Bondage when, tied by his club-foot to the dancehall table, he gazes down at the midnight throng in the

Gaiete Montpamasse, and sees them all as various kinds of animals, the fox, the wolf and the jackal. Sometimes in early youth such a

vision persists and colours a lifetime, like Joyce's experience as he walked along the shore near Dollymount. If it is objected that Philip is not Maugham, one can quote Maugham himself:

" Since Maupassant and Chekhov, who tried so hard to be objec

tive, nevertheless are so nakedly personal, it has sometimes seemed to me that if the author can in no way keep himself out of his work

it might be better if he put in as much of himself as possible."

It might also be better if he told his readers he was doing so.

'II

Maugham may now be said, with trite conclusiveness, to be in the

evening of his days. After all, from 1897 to 1948-he published a

book in the first and the last of these years and scores of books and

stories in between-is a good innings. In his last two novels-Then and Now and Catalina-he has deserted the moderns and gone back

to the Renaissance. Perhaps he is conscious of failing powers and

feels that odious comparisons can hardly be drawn between a histori

cal romance and a novel of the " modemr" type like Cakes and Ale.

Oddly enough, Conrad did the same thing. The reasons are not

necessarily the same. Of Conrad it could be said that having, as it

were, ventured on shore in his latter days to describe something not

so familiar to him as the material of his earlier works, he sensed the

lack of sympathy between the people he was describing and his

theories of life; and so he went to a period, the Napoleonic Wars,

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IRISH MONTHLY

where the imaginative reconstruction of historical characters could proceed untrammelled by the hard facts of modern life.

It is possiblp that some such change is at work in Somerset

Maugham; but I do not think so. Having attacked for half a century

the half-faiths and half-truths that have done duty as religiofi for so many millions of his fellows, he realizes he has been flogging a dead horse. If the whole of the civilization built up over four centuries on the doctrines of the Reformation collapsed in a heap to-morrow, there would still remain the hard core round which these doctrines had grown and from which, fungus-like, they derived their strength. Up to recently the Catholic Church had not been taken seriously by Maugham. There had been a few deft snaps of the fingers like the

portrait of the Jewess Muriel in The Alien Corn. "Muriel was a Catholic and she often told you that she had been

educated at a convent-' Such sweet women, those nuns. I always said

that if I had a daughter I should have her sent to a convent, too '-but she liked her servants to be Church of England."

Lawson, too, in The Pool, went to Midnight Mass before he com

mitted suicide. But it is in The Razor's Edge that the first rumbles of the storm

are heard. One of the chief characters is a Catholic-Elliott Temple ton. Of him we are told that " he attended Mass every Sunday at

the church frequented by the best peoplc." His view of marriage is that it " can only maintain its authority if extra-conjugal relations are not only toleratcd but sanctioncd."

Another character, the Pole Kostcr, is also a Catholic. "He was a devotut Catlholic andi had a crucifix hanging over his

bed, and he went to Mass every Sunday regularly. On Saturday nights he used to get drunk."

the chief character, Larry Darrell, spends some time at a Benedic tine monastery and is highly dissatisfied with the monks' rephes to

his objections. He had every right to be, if their replies were as futile

as Maugham would have us believe.

Now this book was published in 1944. It shows an unprecedented, if malignant, interest in the Church. Has he realised, in the clarity of

old age, that he has been wasting his time, and decided to attack, in the short space left to him, the origin and source of What passes for religion and morality in the modern world, the substance of. the shadows of our time? Has he decided to attack her at her strongest,

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as he imagines she and her children were in the ages of Faith?

Whether the answer is in the affirmative, or whether there is an answer at all to these questions, his last two novels deal with Catholic Italy and Catholic Spain during the Renaissance period. As is td be imagined, neither Church nor people come out very creditably. But then few people do in the world of Somerset Maugham. One thing that strikes the reader is the similarity of the characters to those of his

more modem stories. The ape, the jackal and the hyena are well to

the fore. The scenes have been re-set, the costumes changed, but vice is still triumphant and virtue made to look foolish. Only now it is a Catholic virtue that is mocked and laughed at, and vices specificaly denounced by Catholic teaching are given as the norm of Catholic conduct. The moral is obvious. Plus fa change, plus c'est la me2me chose. Or, in Maugham's own words-the mixture as before.

There is a certain false view of life, the besetting sin of Hollywood, where the good are so virtuous as to be nauseating, and the bad so

villainous as to be incredible. One can easily see this giving birth by a species of aversion to the view of life, we have been considering. Especially would this be so in a young writer revolting against the popular novelist of thirty years ago who viewed existence as all

couleur de rose, showing not the slightest perception of those infinite gradations of light and shade that mark the human scene. Such

would be only a natural, even a healthy, reaction in any writer de

termined to use the material of life in his stories and not the faded

properties of a cardboard stage. But one would expect the young writer to grow out of it, his work to recover its balance and show

some appreciation of the complexity, for good or ill, of the human action it attempted to portray.

It is a curious fact that we find no such development in Maugham.

It is presumably the reason for his being so completely ignored by the

critics, for all his artistry in words. Perhaps it is not his fault. Perhaps

the natural shock which every young intelligence receives when it exchanges the certainties of the home for the treacherous quicksands of the outer world had occurred too early for the boy of eight. The

detached observer of human folly was stricken himself. He was his own worst patient.

And yet it is difficult not to feel more than a strain of perversity in

Maugham. It is incredible that so much intelligence, so much know

ledge of human nature (even though it specializes in its seamier side)

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shuld be so hopelessly in the wrong except by a deliberate act of the

will. One is inclined to think that here is shown a certain pleasure in life that is nasty, brutish and short; that it is with glee and not with pity that he views the posturings of his characters on the stage of cxistence. It is the absence of pity that makes him secouid-rate and recalls to our minds the words of Macaulay about the Restoration dramatists:

"The question is simply this, whether a man of genius who con stantly and systematically endeavours to make this sort of character attractive, by uniting it with beauty, grace, dignity, spirit, popularity, literature, wit, taste, knowledge of the world, brilliant success in every undertaking, does or does not make an ill use of his powers. We own that we are unable to understand how this question can be answered in any way but one."

While not so certain as Macaulay about the ultimate answer, one may be forgiven for thinking that here, perhaps, is the heart of the matter, and that the characteristics of environment and experience we have mentioned are merely the fagade of something that is positive and decided, an alien view of life.

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