W. Somerset Maugham: Novelist, Playwright, Traveller

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM:
NOVELIST, PLAYWRIGHT, TRAVELLER

W. Somerset Maugham died full of honours and of years. Even by traditional Western standards his had been a long and laborious life. He had very nearly completed his century, and that century, it must be said to his eternal credit, was packed with multifarious activity. He was a doctor by profession, a traveller by inclination, and an author by sheer compulsion; he was not, that is to say, an author “to the manner born”, not having come to authorship con amore. It was almost as if second thoughts supervened and forced him to turn novelist and playwright. That he ended up as a very successful novelist and playwright is not the point. The point is that the writing of novels and plays was not his first love. I am rather inclined to think that if it had been his first love, matters might well have planned out differentially and that he might have emerged as a much more considerable literary figure than he actually did.

Of course, this is, in the nature of things, only a speculation. It may be worthy of consideration, or contrariwise, it may not. But it interests me enormously and I hope it will not fail to interest a few others also. At the moment I have neither the time nor the energy to pursue it to its logical conclusion. I am only throwing out the suggestion–that is all: “it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.”

The Great Cham

Everyone must be asking himself what the Great Cham of English letters–for, of a certainty, he was that, although he was not, in so many words, hailed as such by his colleagues in the profession–means to him personally. To me he does not, as it happens, mean much. When Joseph Conrad died, Mr. H. M. Tominson (alas, no more with us) felt impelled to write this glowing panegyric of him:

“Somehow, life seems justified only by some proved friends and the achievements of good men who are still with us. Once we were so assured of the opulence and spiritual vitality of mankind that the loss of a notable figure did not seem to leave us any the poorer. But today, when it happens, we feel a distinct diminution of our light. That has been dimmed oflate years by lusty barbarians, and we look now to the few manifestly superior minds in our midst to keep our faith in humanity sustained. The certainly that Joseph Conrad was somewhere in Kent was an assurance and a solace in years that have not been easily borne.” (Gifts of Fortune.Italics mine.)

Plainly, this kind of apostrophe would be most inappropriate in the case of Maugham. This is what I imply when I say that to me Maugham does not mean much: I cannot go into dithyrambics over him, come hell or high water. I adore him–but only this side idolatry. I cannot even honestly claim to have read all his works (I wonder whether anyone can). Nor can I honestly claim that those few of them that I have read have enthused me hugely: they certainly have not, as the saying is, “bowled me over”. We all have (or should have) our assorted literary heroes. I have mine, both among the living and the dead, but he was assuredly not among them.

Swift and Mangham

There was something in his general attitude to life that repelled me a good deal. By and large he did not, it must be sadly confessed, love his fellow-men. But that is wrapping it up in a small parcel, as the immortal Sam Weller would have put it: he positively loathed them, and the impression he consistently conveyed by his printed words was that he wrote his books just to get that hearty loathing off his chest.
I am perfectly well aware that Swift also was not a gushing lover of humanity. But Swift had his wonderful prose style to redeem that glaring defect. Maugham, however (though, according to his own testament, he had tried very, very hard, indeed), had not that inestimable advantage. His prose style is pedestrian to a degree. The finest prose style is, undoubtedly, the simple style, but a simple style need not be pedestrian. There is an ornament that pertains to simplicity, and there is a simplicity that is, at the same time, scholarly. But flatness was the besetting sin of Maugham’s manner of writing, and it is one that is not calculated to endear readers to him unduly.

Maugham’s ill-concealed cynicism, then, repels quite a few people: and his singular lack of a seductive prose style does not, as I have already indicated, mollify them to any appreciable extent. But that is far from being the whole story and there are other factors that have made his name famous throughout the English-speaking world. Cynicism has one enormous virtue. More than sentimentality (of which it is the diametrical opposite) it enables you to enter unerringly into what Mr. Wodehouse’s celebrated “gentleman’s gentleman” Jeeves, calls “the psychology of the individual”. “Men in the loomp are bad”–or so the poet tells us–and an early inkling of this fundamental truth (combined, I suspect, with his initial training as a medical practitioner) appears to have made of Maugham an expert psychologist- especially of the fairer and the gentler sex. Mrs. Virginia Woolf has declared somewhere that every woman is a rake at heart. Maugham’s writings point the same moral and adorn the same tale.

Cakes and Ale

What I have read of his prodigious output has left an indelible impression on my mind. He, obviously, inclines to the view that we, humans, are not only fallen angels but fallen apes as well. All his novels and short stories, right from his earliest effort Liza of Lambeth, up to his last, arc steeped in his ineradicable conviction of man’s “original sin.” Even Cakes and Ale, his undoubted masterpiece (he himself, it will be recalled, preferred it to the more popular choice, Of Human Bondage), has that unsavoury theme at its core. Take away the heroine Rose’s multiple infidelities and what have you left of it? Of his three famous books, Cakes and Ale and The Razor’s Edge and Of Human Bondage, the first is decidedly in a class apart: if only because it is, of the group, the most impeccably written. It is the one where one may legitimately assert that he has a distinct (and not unmemorable) prose style. It is also extremely entertaining: the quality that runs like a golden thread through the tapestry of his work.

The entertainment value of his other two novels that I have mentioned above–as also of his two outstanding short stories, Rain and The Letter–sticksout a mile. As a matter of fact the chief asset of Maugham is this same entertainment value that can be encountered in the least significant of his writings. As a story-teller he is “the Pillars of Hercules of mortal achievement”, as Maurice Baring said of Sarah Bernhardt’s acting. His plots unfailingly grip, and one is impatient to get to the end of them and to find out what has happened to whom.

The English Conrad

Joseph Conrad imbued in me an irrepressible longing for stories in exotic settings–especially Malaysian and Polynesian–and I have always regarded Maugham as the “English Conrad”: this cognomen has been bestowed, wrongly, on the late Mr. H. M Tomlinson. We, in India, have a natural preference for Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. The hero meets a renowned Hindu sage in the deep south (Ramana Maharshi, no less, according to legend) and there is a lot of philosophical palaver. At the close, however, the hero, obviously, is “not amused”, and comes out by the same door as in he went.

In his autobiographical fragment, The Summing Up, which everystudent of Maugham ought to read, mark, and inwardly digest, he is at pains to explain that he raised himself by his own bootstraps, as it were, to the enviable eminence that he ultimately achieved as a literary figure. Like one immensely greater than himself he confessed that he had ‘played the sedulous ape” to many reputed authors. This did not, to be sure, make him another Robert Louis Stevenson. But, otherwise, it might not have made him even a W. Somerset Maugham. I shall end this critique o Maugham with that sober reflection.