The Incomplete Maugham
Nolte, William H.
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...though, will most delight in a remark that Maugham, in his dotage, made about his d a u g h t e r ' s second husband, whom he considered rather a skinflint: "He would pick a brass farthing out of a dog's turd...
...I t would cramp your style...
...Snow answered the question this way: " T h i s t a r t n e s s , this capacity for suffering which was obviously very deep in him, this lack of self-pity, this sort of harsh self-irony: I think that is really what one reads him for...
...He seemed, as Morgan notes, "embalmed in hatred...
...On Robin's coming of age (he was then at Cambridge), Maugham wrote him: "My good Robin, I am assured A. that tomorrow is your birthday and B. that being a born fool you have C. mucked up your beautiful car, therefore, in celebration of A. and because you cannot be accounted responsible for B. which is obviously the fault of your progenitors, I am sending you a cheque which may in part repair the 19 results of C." Seventeen years later, on hearing t h a t Robin was o f f to Africa, Maugham wrote to wish him bon voyage: "Don't let an angry sheik catch you in his harem and cruelly c a s t r a t e y o u , " he warned...
...Maugham's books are unfailingly interesting, though much of what he says about his famous uncle must be taken with a grain of salt, especially in the last book, here he places in quotation marks many comments of Maugham's that he had no way of hearing...
...It nevertheless provides us with a candid appraisal of his life as a writer--as one of the few genuine men of letters in this century...
...Needless to say, Of Human Bondage remains his g r e a t e s t achievement...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 found any relationship on complete trust or unselfish affection...
...There can be no doubt that the death of his mother, two years before that of his father, was the great trauma of his life, one from which he never fully recovered...
...In its first year, Liza of Lambeth earned him just 20 pounds (about a hundred dollars...
...Rather than attempt to break new ground, he cultivated the soil that storytellers have been working since the beginning of time...
...Being aware of his limitations as an artist, he was able to make the most of his l i t e r a r y gifts, which included, among other things, an excellent sense of the dramatic...
...Although concerned with moral values, Maugham was never moralistic...
...On receiving numerous protests from admirers of Maugham, who asked him to read the short stories, Wilson did so and remarked in a postscriptum that they "are readable --quite entertaining...
...Maugham employs Kant's aesthetic ideas (as found in Critique of the Power of Judgment) as the touchstone for a discourse on the nature of beauty...
...I have had some sort of story to tell and it has interested me to tell it...
...He failed of being a very g r e a t writer because his experience was inadequate and his sympathieswere imperfect...
...Eliot's essay...
...But the passage is revealing nevertheless...
...While immersing myself in Maugham's opera I read a handful of books about him: most notably, Anthony C u r t i s ' s critical study The Pattern of Maugham (1974), which contains an appreciative and at times insightful examination of all the major works...
...Born in Paris in 1874, Maugham was orphaned at age ten, at which time he was sent to England to live with his father's only living brother, an Anglican clergyman, and his German-born wife, a childless couple in their middle years...
...then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards...
...With the severance of the maternal tie, he was set adrift in an alien and shoreless world...
...The Selected Prefaces volume contains two other good examples of Maugham's criticism: one on "The Art of Fiction" and the other an introduction to Tellers of Tales (1939...
...and it tells us, at least in outline, a good deal about the man himself...
...Maugham's great popular success in the telling has, needless to say, caused a few critics to view him askance, as if popularity were ipso facto evidence of mediocrity...
...If he solves none of the "problems" of a e s t h e t i c s (which are insoluble in any case), he shows how they might be approached both informally and intelligently and with an open mind...
...My guess is that three or four of the novels and eight or ten of the short stories will continue finding r e a d e r s a f t e r this century limps to its close...
...By the time one gets to the final bald statement, one is prepared to believe what can only be a charming lie...
...There is not much to choose between men...
...In the '. , t t e r essay he devotes a b r i e f section tc :~.enry James, whom he knew personally and whose work he admired for its technical artistry but whose shortcomings he saw clearly...
...According to Maugham, Syrie was scatterbrained and snobbish, pleasure-seeking and selfabsorbed, whining and selfish, dishonest, unscrupulous, and promiscuous...
...Having known James, as he admits, may have colored his view: "No one who knew Henry James in the flesh can read his stories dispassionately...
...Or the best, anyhow, on K i p l i n g ' s stories: He makes only a glancing remark about the verse, referring h i s reader to T.S...
...Why, after the-passage of several years, have I gone back to him...
...Some have more strength of character, or more.opportunity, and so in one direction or another give their instincts freer play, but potentially they are the same...
...Although Maugham wrote in The Summing Up that "the great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love," he more often than not depicts love as being an ephemeral affliction that can cause more suffering than anything else...
...The question is academic, perhaps, but it kept crossing my mind...
...Lord William H. Nolte is C. Wallace Martin Professor of English at the University of South Carolina...
...The good moments that he shared with his wife, their mutual joy in raising a daughter, were forgotten as the slanderous accusations poured forth...
...In defense of my predilection I might summon Maugham himself, who once noted that " a prose play was scarcely less ephemeral than a news sheet...
...Edmund 'r for example, attributed Maugham's "swelling reputation in America" to "the general decline of our standards" and could find no reason for reading him...
...Much of the fiction I had not read in 20 years or more, and many of the critical essays were new to me...
...For one thing, we need to strike the negative from the second sentence...
...He knew he was not in the race of giants...
...As Malcolm Muggeridge has written: "Like all timid, lonely people, money seemed to him a protection...
...But I confess that prose drama no longer fetches me as it did when I was young and full of hope, and hence unable to hear the ticking of the clock...
...a cynical and sharp-eyed observer of human frailties who believed that love, save where it was sexless and even passionless, was disabling and painful, the cement of human bondage, and yet who had a warm spot in his heart for the rake, the nimble jack who takes his joy where and how he will...
...I particularly enjoyed the quotations from his letters (most of them printed for the first time), for example, those to Robin, who waited until Willie's death to defame him...
...His failure (in his eyes) to be one caused him great suffering...
...and many people think it disgraceful to disclose to the public its heroes' failings...
...Although e s s e n t i a l l y deterministic in his attitude toward human behavior, Maugham believed, or tried to believe, that a few f o r t u n a t e men were capable of acting freely...
...At his best he wrote clearly, vigorously, and succintly--if not always euphoniously...
...Since he believed that the prime mover in human affairs was self-interest (hardly a singular notion), he detested uplifters and do-gooders, all those who i, nsisted that their sole mission in life was charity...
...Wilson came to this conclusion after reading Then andNow (1946), one of the least works in the Maugham canon...
...Rather less flamboyantly, Maugham allows Philip Carey to escape his bondage to the Old Adam just as Maugham himself wanted to escape--something he was never really able to do...
...Needless to say, Maugham's criticism, good as it is, has little to do with his reputation, which stands today, as it will tomorrow, primarily on his novels and stories...
...When the autobiographical Looking Back was serialized in Show magazine in 1962 (I recall reading the pieces with utter fascination), many of his oldest friends, Noel Coward among them, turned away from him in disgust...
...Though Robin considered himself fortunate that he "did not suffer from the same delusion as my Uncle Willie, who told me in his old age that his greatest mistake had been to persuade himself that he was three-quarters normal and only a quarter queer--'whereas really it was the other way round,' " he admits that the torment and guilt of his similar nature remained...
...They are all a hotchpotch of greamess and littleness, of virtue and vice, of nobility and baseness...
...I am perfectly willing to believe those critics who say that three or four of his plays are still alive and well this half a century or more since they were first produced and published, but I must leave them to the enjoyment and edification of younger and hardier spirits...
...Still, Maugham concluded the section by notingJames's uncommon gifts...
...It is astonishing, indeed, to note how much of Maugham's fiction turns on the notion of freedom...
...Vulgarians...
...Somerset Maugham (1963...
...On the opening page of The Summing Up (1938) Maugham informs his readers that the book is neither an autobiography nor a book of recollections...
...finally, an inveterate pederast who believed all his life that he had been cut off from genius by his homosexuality, who shrank from that denominating factor of his being and yet indulged his libido in a manner that would have made a goat blush...
...Wells, and Arnold Bennett), but his estimates were somewhat less than adulatory...
...It is worth noting, by the way, that George Orwell, who greatly admired Kipling's poetry, said he had been more influenced by Maugham than by any other modern writer...
...Maugham's stories deal with serious, enduring themes, a f t e r all...
...I quote the passage at length as evidence not only of his charm and good sense, but also of his mastery of the English language: First [the writer] must endure poverty and the world's indifference...
...I hasten to say that my time was well spent...
...Maugham (1966...
...He admitted that he had small power of imagination, that he was a Constable and not a Michelangelo, one who must be s a t i s f i e d , as he put it, with occupying a seat " i n the very f i r s t row of the s e c o n d - r a t e r s . " But then it must be obvious that if we restrict our reading to only the first-raters, we will not spend much time with books...
...Importantly, he concludes The Summing Up with a discourse on Love, Beauty, 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 and Goodness--and the greatest of these is Goodness, which he defines as "the retort that humour makes to the tragic absurdity of fate Unlike beauty, it can be perfect without being tedious, and, greater than love, time does not wither its delight...
...Certainly, he was himself without illusions concerning the place posterity might assign him...
...Rather, he sought the kind of freedom that only money can buy...
...Nowhere else does Maugham better distinguish between the artist who "lived life passionately," as did Dickens and Balzac, or Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and the a r t i s t , like James, who was content to observe life from a window, a fact that prevented him from ever being able to describe life as it is or has ever been...
...His last opus, a book of reminiscences, appeared in 1962, when he was eighty-eight, by which time he had long since been a millionaire several times over and the world's most famous writer...
...With understandable pride Maugham once wrote: "As a writer of fiction I go back, through innumerable generations, to the teller of tales around the fire in the cavern that sheltered neolithic men...
...Apparently he was never thereafter able to "Simon & Schuster, $17.95...
...a man who could be both generous and mean-minded, thoughtful and thoughtless far beyond any human norm...
...Though Maugham n e v e r considered h i m s e l f a critic or a scholar, not in any professional sense anyhow, his erudition is everywhere apparent and nowhere intrusive in his expository prose...
...The first is the essay " A f t e r Reading Burke," which contains one of the best analyses of English sentence structure I have seen...
...As he tries to show in such stories as "Rain," "charity" is sometimes little more than self-delusion...
...he offered no nostrums, and he refused to take himself too seriously...
...Here we have The Old Party, warts and all--a liter~ ary craftsman of the first chop, and yet one capable (if that's the right word) of writing the most hackneyed and clich&ridden prose by way of keeping the cash registers ringing (Maugham always insisted that money was like a sixth sense, without which you could not make the most of the other five...
...He later told Garson Kanin that the view that he wrote for money was false: Had financial gain been his primary motivation he would have given up long before his first success...
...If anything, he overstates those " t r u t h s " in a curiously oblique way, as if he were making allowances for the fact that the English law under which Oscar Wilde was tried and imprisoned in 1895 prohibited him from being specific...
...he expresses his views without apology, noting frequently how they differ from received opinion...
...For example: "Henry James's fictions are like the cobwebs which a spider may spin in the attic of some old house, i n t r i c a t e , delicate and even beautiful, but which at any moment the housemaid's broom with brutal common sense may sweep away...
...But then I want to add something: I find that in Maugham's company I somehow fail to hear the ticking of that damned clock...
...In such a view, which smacks of moral egalitarianism, there is no doubt an element of pure tosh...
...The fact remains," he wrote, "that those last novels of his, notwithstanding their unreality, make all other novels, except the very best, unreadable...
...He is never pedantic or professorial...
...Maugham's first ten years as a writer were financially difficult, but they were the last to be so...
...He did not have a single good word to say about her...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 21...
...in fact, he concluded his note by calling Maugham " a half-trashy novelist, who writes badly, but is patronized by half-serious readers, who do not care much about writing...
...I had forgotten just how good his best is...
...The autobiography is a painful, and often moving, account of the early years spent living in the shadow of his f a t h e r , a former Lord Chancellor of England, and of his uncle Somerset, who disapproved of Robin's decision to become a writer and of his sexual inclinations...
...It is undoubtedly one of the best autobiographical novels in the language, worthy of being set alongside J o y c e ' s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, flawed though it is by a happy ending which seems somewhat contrived...
...He saw no reason, though, for changing his view...
...But he has one compensation...
...Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it...
...For my part I do not think I am any better or any worse than most people, but I know that if I set down every action in my life and every thought that has crossed my mind the world would consider me a monster of depravity...
...His style, which he labored over all his life, is without frills and thus immune to changes of fashion...
...Goodness, on the other hand, is a part of our being, and hence an essence, tf Maugham attempted to deny that in his remarks about our being a hotchpotch of virtue and vice, of nobility and baseness, I think it apparent from his writings, full of contradictions as they are, that he wanted more than anything else to be a good man...
...At least two other selections from Maugham's expository prose rival his remarks on James and Kipling as examples of his acute critical sense...
...Nevertheless, only the most devout Jamesian could fail to see the judiciousness of Maugham's s t r i c t u r e s , kindly enunciated as they were...
...Between 1897, when Liza of Lambeth appeared, and 1907, when his first successful play, Lady Frederick, was produced, he published seven novels, a collection of short stories, a travel book, and four plays...
...As I say, Morgan depicts his subject in the round: from his first stumbling efforts, through his great successes, and on to the bitter and pathetic end, when Maugham was babbling insanely and maliciously, cursing the gods who had, in the main, smiled on him...
...Incidentally, Wilson later made the fatal error of admitting that he had never read Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, or The Razor's Edge...
...He is the only free man...
...Still, there is in the novel a powerful r e n d e r i n g of human agony, made all the more moving in that the agony is largely self-induced...
...Such a view might be laughed at i f discovered in a philosophical treatise, but encountered at the end of this p a r t i c u l a r novel it is altogether fitting and proper...
...As the gods would have it, Syrie evidently loved Maugham to the end of her life, aware though she was of his feelings toward her...
...F o r several weeks past I have devoted a few hours of each day to reading Somerset Maugham's stories, novels, and nonfiction...
...Like all good biographies, Maugham teems with gossip--about Maugham's friends, his travels, his income, his loves and hates, his poor, ragged human failings...
...they tell us something about the human condition...
...As it turned out, he finished medical school at the same time his first novel was published...
...Henry James was shy of the elementals of human nature...
...Still, the question is asked and must be answered: Why does one read Maugham...
...He might also have said that beauty, at least of the kind he describes, resides outside--in the material world which we can only admire or enjoy...
...his best novel then certainly his most ehtertaining--Maugham pauses to comment on the tribulations-and rewards that accrue to the man of letters...
...He ;nfects us with his own delight in such masters of English prose--besides Burke - - a s William Hazlitt (probably his favorite, I am happy to say), Swift, and Dryden...
...The rather long introduction he wrote for a volume of Kipling's best stories (chosen by himself) is, quite simply, the best thing on Kipling I've seen...
...His heart was an organ subject to no serious agitation, and his i n t e r e s t s were confined to persons of his own class...
...While reading Maugham, or r a t h e r reading in him, I wondered if he would appeal to later generations...
...And the greatest suffering, he seems to say, r e s u l t s from our loving someone whom we know to be unworthy of adoration...
...In truth, a good many serious readers who know a great deal about writing have always admired Maugham...
...and Robin Maugham's t h r e e books, Somerset and All the Maughams (1966), the autobiographical Escape from the Shadows (1972), and Conversations with Willie (1978...
...Over the next 26 years he had 29 plays produced...
...His appeal, after all, is similar to that of Maupassant and Kipling, and they stand up r a t h e r well...
...If Maugham's novels and short stories have lost little of their charm (for me anyhow), one must take care in choosing which ones to read...
...In many ways the story is t h a t of a modern pilgrim's progress through a life that, as Maugham elsewhere put it, has a gl"eat deal of rhyme but absolutely no reason...
...Something escapes you," Maugham notes, "unless you have been an actor in the tragicomedy...
...He depends upon a fickle public...
...It set up a buffer betwen him and a largely alien and hostile worl& To this end he sought it, first diligently and ardently, and finally as an addiction...
...And in another essay from The Vagrant Mood, entitled "Reflections on a Certain Book...
...In The Vagrant Mood Maugham had written humorously and affectionately of James, in the essay "Some Novelists I Have Known" (the novelists were James, H.G...
...Thirty years after the publication of his great autobiographical novel~ Of Human Bondage (1915), while reading the first chapter of that work, which describes his mother's death, for a recording for the blind, he broke down and was unable to finish...
...On the other hand, his plays I left for another day (or life), having long since abandoned that genre except for an occasional visit to the theater, or a debauch with the dozen or so of Shakespeare's plays that, for me anyhow, make better reading than viewing...
...One does not, after all, want to waste one's youth on the secondary art of criticism...
...He got the sound of his voice into every line he wrote, and you accept (not willingly, but with indulgence) the abominable style of his later work, with its ugly Gallicism, its abuse of adverbs, its too elaborate metaphors, the tortuosity of its long sentences, because they are part and parcel of the charm, benignity and amusing pomposity of the man you remember...
...In the following passage, for example, he reveals about as much as the law allowed: We are shocked when we discover that great men were weak and petty, dishonest or selfish, sexually vicious, vain or intemperate...
...For example, near the end of Cakes and M e - - i f not...
...JUSt how great that suffering was may be seen in Ted Morgan's Maugham...
...I accept Snow's reasons without a murmur...
...In 1908 he became the first English playwright ever to have four plays running in London's West End theaters...
...Having plowed through its enormous bulk, I now believe I know the man whose books have entertained me since my nonage...
...Like all good w r i t e r s , Maugham was less concerned with effects than he was with causes, which are often quite d i f f e r e n t from the ones we give when trying to explain our actions...
...His novels enjoyed a steady success over the years, particularly Of Human Bondage, which in 1946, 30 years after it had first appeared, was still selling 30,000 copies a year...
...At times, to protect himself as well as others, he has to speak in generalities, but nowhere, so far as I can tell, does he misrepresent or dodge unsavory truths...
...It is an excellent study of human freedom and the limitations thereof...
...Since his famous stammer (which incidentally did not appear until after his removal to England) cut him off from the professions of law, politics, and the clergy (the last of which he couldn't have endured in any case)--professions in which members of his family had been, or were to become, highly renowned--he turned to medicine, not as a career but rather as a stopgap against his being unable to make his living as a writer...
...Joyce, you will recall, concluded his novel with Stephen Dedalus setting forth to "forge on the smithy of his soul" the "uncreated conscience" of his race...
...Along with The Summing Up, which he wrote in his middle sixties, I would highly recommend three other volumes of essays: The Vagrant Mood (1953), Points of View (1958), and Selected Prefaces and Introductions ofT...
...But then, it is not uncommon for autobiographical novels to end with a prophetic flourish, nor is it surprising, considering the identity of protagonist and author...
...His short stories are e s s e n t i a l l y unmaskings of the protagonists, revelations of the ties that bind men and women and shape their lives...
...He was twenty-three...
...Maugham's reluctance to condemn his fellows grew from his wide acquaintance with men, to be sure, but also, I believe, from his own sense of guilt...
...and all the while he reminds us that he is guided as much as the next fellow by the limitations of experience, taste, and prejudice...
...He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him, and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax-gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their mat20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 rimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience...
...Between the two "weather reports" which open and close the long book--"the day broke gray and dull" are the first words of the novel, and " t h e sun was s h i n i n g " are the last--we follow the progress of his protagonist from childhood into young manhood, from his helpless bondage to irrational desire to his deliverance from the prison of self...
...Garson Kanin's fond recollections, Remembering Mr...
...Beverley Nichols' malicious attack on his former mentor, intended ostensibly as a defense of Maugham's wife, Syrie, but really a foppish exercise in self-aggrandizement, e n t i t l e d A Case of Human Bondage (1966...
Vol. 13 • August 1980 • No. 8
