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When Winter Comes to Main Street, a non-fiction book by Grant Martin Overton |
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Chapter 17. The Heterogeneous Magic Of Maugham |
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_ CHAPTER XVII. THE HETEROGENEOUS MAGIC OF MAUGHAM =i= Now, I don't know where to begin. Probably I shall not know where to leave off, either. That is my usual misfortune, to write a chapter at both ends. It is a fatal thing, like the doubly-consuming candle. Perhaps I might start with the sapience of Hector MacQuarrie, author of Tahiti Days. I am tempted to, because so many people think of W. Somerset Maugham as the author of The Moon and Sixpence. The day will come, however, when people will think of him as the man who wrote Of Human Bondage. This novel does not need praise. All it needs, like the grand work it is, is attention; and that it increasingly gets.
Theodore Dreiser reviewed Of Human Bondage for the New Republic. I reprint part of what he said: "Sometimes in retrospect of a great book the mind falters, confused by the multitude and yet the harmony of the detail, the strangeness of the frettings, the brooding, musing intelligence that has foreseen, loved, created, elaborated, perfected, until, in the middle ground which we call life, somewhere between nothing and nothing, hangs the perfect thing which we love and cannot understand, but which we are compelled to confess a work of art. It is at once something and nothing, a dream of happy memory, a song, a benediction. In viewing it one finds nothing to criticise or to regret. The thing sings, it has colour. It has rapture. You wonder at the loving, patient care which has evolved it. "Here is a novel or biography or autobiography or social transcript of the utmost importance. To begin with, it is unmoral, as a novel of this kind must necessarily be. The hero is born with a club foot, and in consequence, and because of a temperament delicately attuned to the miseries of life, suffers all the pains, recessions, and involute self tortures which only those who have striven handicapped by what they have considered a blighting defect can understand. He is a youth, therefore, with an intense craving for sympathy and understanding. He must have it. The thought of his lack, and the part which his disability plays in it soon becomes an obsession. He is tortured, miserable. "Curiously the story rises to no spired climax. To some it has apparently appealed as a drab, unrelieved narrative. To me at least it is a gorgeous weave, as interesting and valuable at the beginning as at the end. There is material in its three hundred thousand or more words for many novels and indeed several philosophies, and even a religion or stoic hope. There are a series of women, of course--drab, pathetic, enticing as the case may be,--who lead him through the mazes of sentiment, sex, love, pity, passion; a wonderful series of portraits and of incidents. There are a series of men friends of a peculiarly inclusive range of intellectuality and taste, who lead him, or whom he leads, through all the intricacies of art, philosophy, criticism, humour. And lastly comes life itself, the great land and sea of people, England, Germany, France, battering, corroding, illuminating, a Goyaesque world. "Naturally I asked myself how such a book would be received in America, in England. In the latter country I was sure, with its traditions and the Athenaeum and the Saturday Review, it would be adequately appreciated. Imagine my surprise to find that the English reviews were almost uniformly contemptuous and critical on moral and social grounds. The hero was a weakling, not for a moment to be tolerated by sound, right-thinking men. On the other hand, in America the reviewers for the most part have seen its true merits and stated them. Need I say, however, that the New York World finds it 'the sentimental servitude of a poor fool,' or that the Philadelphia Press sees fit to dub it 'futile Philip,' or that the Outlook feels that 'the author might have made his book true without making it so frequently distasteful'; or that the Dial cries 'a most depressing impression of the futility of life'? "Despite these dissonant voices it is still a book of the utmost import, and has so been received. Compact of the experiences, the dreams, the hopes, the fears, the disillusionments, the ruptures, and the philosophising of a strangely starved soul, it is a beacon light by which the wanderer may be guided. Nothing is left out; the author writes as though it were a labour of love. It bears the imprint of an eager, almost consuming desire to say truly what is in his heart. "Personally, I found myself aching with pain when, yearning for sympathy, Philip begs the wretched Mildred, never his mistress but on his level, to no more than tolerate him. He finally humiliates himself to the extent of exclaiming, 'You don't know what it means to be a cripple!' The pathos of it plumbs the depths. The death of Fannie Price, of the sixteen-year-old mother in the slum, of Cronshaw, and the rambling agonies of old Ducroz and of Philip himself, are perfect in their appeal. "There are many other and all equally brilliant pictures. No one short of a genius could rout the philosophers from their lairs and label them as individuals 'tempering life with rules agreeable to themselves' or could follow Mildred Rogers, waitress of the London A B C restaurant, through all the shabby windings of her tawdry soul. No other than a genius endowed with an immense capacity for understanding and pity could have sympathised with Fannie Price, with her futile and self-destructive art dreams; or old Cronshaw, the wastrel of poetry and philosophy; or Mons. Ducroz, the worn-out revolutionary; or Thorne Athelny, the caged grandee of Spain; or Leonard Upjohn, airy master of the art of self-advancement; or Dr. South, the vicar of Blackstable, and his wife--these are masterpieces. They are marvellous portraits; they are as smooth as a Vermeer, as definite as a Hals; as brooding and moving as a Rembrandt. The study of Carey himself, while one sees him more as a medium through which the others express themselves, still registers photographically at times. He is by no means a brooding voice but a definite, active, vigorous character. "If the book can be said to have a fault it will lie for some in its length, 300,000 words, or for others in the peculiar reticence with which the last love affair in the story is handled. Until the coming of Sallie Athelny all has been described with the utmost frankness. No situation, however crude or embarrassing, has been shirked. In the matter of the process by which he arrived at the intimacy which resulted in her becoming pregnant not a word is said. All at once, by a slight frown which she subsequently explains, the truth is forced upon you that there has been a series of intimacies which have not been accounted for. After Mildred Rogers and his relationship with Norah Nesbit it strikes one as strange.... "One feels as though one were sitting before a splendid Shiraz or Daghestan of priceless texture and intricate weave, admiring, feeling, responding sensually to its colours and tones. Mr. Maugham ... has suffered for the joy of the many who are to read after him. By no willing of his own he has been compelled to take life by the hand and go down where there has been little save sorrow and degradation. The cup of gall and wormwood has obviously been lifted to his lips and to the last drop he has been compelled to drink it. Because of this, we are enabled to see the rug, woven of the tortures and delights of a life. We may actually walk and talk with one whose hands and feet have been pierced with nails." =iii= I turn, for a different example of the heterogeneous magic of Maugham, including his ability to create and sustain a mood in his readers, to the words of Mr. MacQuarrie, who writes: "It was Tahiti. With a profound trust in my discretion, or perhaps an utter ignorance of the homely fact that people have their feelings, a London friend sent us a copy of The Moon and Sixpence. This friend, actually a beautiful, well set up woman of the intelligent class in England (which is more often than not the upper fringes or spray of the bourgeoisie), wrote: 'You will be interested in this book, since quite the most charming portion of it deals with your remote island of Tahiti. I met the author last night at Lady B----'s. I think the landlady at the end, Mrs. Johnson, is a perfect darling.' "Knowing Somerset Maugham as a dramatist, the author of that kind of play which never bored one, but rather sent one home suffused with pleasantness, I opened the book with happy anticipation. Therefore--and the title of the book, The Moon and Sixpence, gave a jolly calming reaction--I was surprised and frankly annoyed when I found myself compelled to follow the fortunes of a large red-headed man with mighty sex appeal, who barged his way through female tears to a final goal which seemed to be a spiritual achievement, and a nasty death in a native fare. I was alarmed; here was a man writing something enormously strong, when I had been accustomed to associate him with charming London nights--the theatre, perfect acting, no middle class problems, a dropping of one's women folks at their doors and a return to White's and whiskey and a soda. And furthermore, in this book of his, he had picked up Lavina, the famous landlady of the Tiare Hotel, the uncrowned queen of Tahiti, and with a few strokes of his pen, had dissected her, and exposed her to the world as she was. Here I must quote: "'Tall and extremely stout, she would have been an imposing presence if the great good nature of her face had not made it impossible for her to express anything but kindliness. Her arms were like legs of mutton, her breasts like giant cabbages; her face, broad and fleshy, gave you an impression of almost indecent nakedness and vast chin succeeded vast chin.' "This may seem a small matter in a great world. Tahiti is a small world, and this became a great matter. I read the book twice, decided that Somerset Maugham could no longer be regarded as a pleasant liqueur, but rather as the joint of a meal requiring steady digestion, and suppressed The Moon and Sixpence on Tahiti. The temptation to lend it to a kindred spirit was almost unbearable, but the thought of Lavina hearing of the above description of her person frightened me and I resisted. For kindred souls, on Tahiti as elsewhere, have their own kindred souls, and slowly but surely the fact that a writer had described her arms as legs of mutton (perfect!) and her breasts as huge cabbages (even better!) would have oozed its way to Lavina, sending her to bed for six days, with gloom spread over Tahiti and no cocktails. "All of which is a trifle by the way. Yet in writing of Somerset Maugham one must gaze along all lines of vision. And it seemed to me that Tahiti in general, and Papeete in particular should supply a clear one; for here, certainly, in the days when Maugham visited the island a man could be mentally dead, spiritually naked and physically unashamed. I therefore sought Lavina one afternoon as she sat clothed as with a garment by the small side verandah of the Tiare Hotel. (Lavina was huge; the verandah was a small verandah as verandahs go; there was just room for me and a bottle of rum.) "'Lavina,' I remarked; 'many persons who write come to Tahiti.' "'It is true,' she admitted, 'but not as the heavy rain, rather as the few drops at the end.' "'Do you like them?' I enquired. "One makes that kind of remark on Tahiti. The climate demands such, since the answer can be almost anything, a meandering spreading-of-weight kind of answer. "'These are good men,' said Lavina steadily, wandering off into the old and possibly untrue story of a lady called Beatrice Grimshaw and her dilemma on a schooner in mid-Pacific, when the captain, a gentle ancient, thinking that the dark women were having it all their own way, offered to embrace Miss Grimshaw, finding in return a gun pointing at his middle, filling him with quaint surprise that anyone could possibly offer violence in defence of a soul in so delightful a climate. "After which and a rum cocktail, I said: 'Lavina, did you see much of M'sieur Somerset Maugham when he was here?' "'It is the man who writes?' she inquired lazily. "'It is,' I returned. "'It is the beau garcon-ta-ta, neneenha roa? ' she suggested. "'Probably not,' I said; 'I suspect you are thinking, as usual, of Rupert Brooke. M'sieur Maugham may be regarded as beau, but he is not an elderly waiter of forty-seven, therefore we may not call him a garcon.' "'It is,' Lavina admitted; 'that I am thinking of M'sieur Rupert, he is the beau garcon.' "'But,' I said, 'I want to know what you thought of M'sieur Somerset Maugham?' "Once started on Rupert Brooke, and Lavina would go on for the afternoon! "'I respect M'sieur Morn,' said Lavina. "'Oh!' thought I; 'if she respects him, then I'm not going to get much.' "'His French is not mixed,' she continued, referring to Maugham's Parisian accent; 'I speak much with him, and he listen, with but a small question here, and one there. It is the pure French from Paris, as M'sieur le Governeur speak, who is the pig. But when he speak much, then it is like the coral which breaks.' "Lavina now wandered off permanently; it was impossible to bring her back. Her image of the brittle coral branches was a mild personality directed at Maugham's stutter, which seldom escapes the most sophisticated observer. For those who interview him always find well cut suitings, clean collars and the stutter, and very little else that they can lay hold of with any degree of honesty. Which only goes to prove my own opinion that Maugham, as an observer, refuses to have his own vision clogged by prying eyes at himself. "I expect that if my French had been better, I might have got some information about Maugham in Tahiti from the bland and badly built French officials who lurk in the official club near the Pomare Palace. I was reduced, in my rather casual investigation, to questioning natives and schooner captains. Once I felt confident of gaining a picture, I asked Titi of Taunoa. (Titi is the lady who figures a trifle disgracefully in Gauguin's Noanoa, the woman he found boring after a few weeks, her French blood being insufficiently exotic to his spirit.) "Said Titi: 'M'sieur Morn? Yes, him I know; he speak good French, and take the door down from the fare on which is the picture done by Gauguin of the lady whose legs are like thin pillows and her arms like fat ropes, very what you call strained, and funny.' "After which her remarks centred around a lover of her sister, who had just died at the age of seventy, and Titi considered that the denouement made by Manu, the sister, was uncalled for at the death bed, since the true and faithful wife stood there surrounded by nine children, all safely born the right side of the sheet. She did mention that the removal of the door from the fare caused the wind to enter. And although I often made inquiries, I never gained much information. Tahiti, as a whole, seemed unaware of Maugham's visit. "They may have adored him; but I suspect he was a quiet joy, the kind native Tahiti soon forgets, certainly not the kind of joy she embodies in her national songs and himines. Such are the merry drunkards, inefficient though earnest white hulahula dancers and the plain (more than everyday) sinners who cut up rough with wild jagged edges and cruel tearings. "His occasional appearance at the French club would raise his status, removing any light touches with his junketings, perhaps turning them into dignified ceremonies. Which, for the Tahitian, approaches the end. The Tahitian never quite understands the white man who consorts with the French officials, although many do. 'For are not these men of Farane,' says the native, 'like the hen that talks without feathers?'--whatever that may mean, but it suggests at once the talkative Frenchman denuding himself on hot evenings, and wearing but the native pareu to hide portions of his bad figure. "But although, in some ways, Maugham hid himself from the natives and pleasant half-castes, he saw them all right, and clearly, since the closing pages of the The Moon and Sixpence display a magical picture of that portion of Tahiti he found time to explore." =iv= Mr. Maugham now offers us On a Chinese Screen, sketches of Chinese life, and East of Suez, his new play. There are fifty-eight sketches in On a Chinese Screen, portraits including European residents in China as well as native types. Here is a sample of the book, the little descriptive study with which it closes, entitled "A Libation to the Gods": "She was an old woman, and her face was wizened and deeply lined. In her grey hair three long silver knives formed a fantastic headgear. Her dress of faded blue consisted of a long jacket, worn and patched, and a pair of trousers that reached a little below her calves. Her feet were bare, but on one ankle she wore a silver bangle. It was plain that she was very poor. She was not stout but squarely built and in her prime she must have done without effort the heavy work in which her life had been spent. She walked leisurely, with the sedate tread of an elderly woman, and she carried on her arm a basket. She came down to the harbour; it was crowded with painted junks; her eyes rested for a moment curiously on a man who stood on a narrow bamboo raft, fishing with cormorants; and then she set about her business. She put down her basket on the stones of the quay, at the water's edge, and took from it a red candle. This she lit and fixed in a chink of the stones. Then she took several joss-sticks, held each of them for a moment in the flame of the candle and set them up around it. She took three tiny bowls and filled them with a liquid that she had brought with her in a bottle and placed them neatly in a row. Then from her basket she took rolls of paper cash and paper 'shoes' and unravelled them, so that they should burn easily. She made a little bonfire, and when it was well alight she took the three bowls and poured out some of their contents before the smouldering joss-sticks. She bowed herself three times and muttered certain words. She stirred the burning paper so that the flames burned brightly. Then she emptied the bowls on the stones and again bowed three times. No one took the smallest notice of her. She took a few more paper cash from her basket and flung them in the fire. Then, without further ado, she took up her basket, and with the same leisurely, rather heavy tread, walked away. The gods were duly propitiated, and like an old peasant woman in France, who has satisfactorily done her day's housekeeping, she went about her business." =v= W. Somerset Maugham was born in 1874, the son of Robert Ormond Maugham. He married Syrie, daughter of the late Dr. Barnardo. Mr. Maugham has a daughter. His education was got at King's School, Canterbury, at Heidelberg University and at St. Thomas's Hospital, London. Mr. Maugham's father was a comparatively prominent solicitor, responsible for the foundation of the Incorporated Society of Solicitors in England. Somerset Maugham, after studying medicine at Heidelberg, went to St. Thomas's, in the section of London known as Lambeth. He obtained his medical degree there. St. Thomas's just across the river from Westminster proved his medical ruin, and his literary birth. The hospital is situated on the border of the slum areas of South London where much that is hopeless, terrible, and wildly cheerful can be found. Persons are not wanting who hold that the slums of Battersea and Lambeth contain more misery and poverty than Limehouse, Whitechapel and the dark forest surrounding the Commercial Road combined. To St. Thomas's daily comes a procession of battered derelicts, seeking attention from the young men in white tunics who hope to be doctors on their own account some day. To St. Thomas's came Eliza of Lambeth, came Liza's mother, came Jim and Tom. Here is the genesis of Maugham's first serious work, Liza of Lambeth. It will be simpler and less confusing to deal with Somerset Maugham in the first instance as a maker of books rather than as a playwright. One cannot help believing that, while not one of his plays can be regarded as a pot boiler, they yet but seldom display that fervent purpose found in his books. Yet in his plays, one finds a greater attention to conventional technique and "form" than one finds in books like Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence. The first book launched by Somerset Maugham, Liza of Lambeth, could hardly have been, considering its slight dimensions, a clearer indication of the line he was to follow. It came out at a time when Gissing was still in favour, and the odour of mean streets was accepted as synonymous with literary honesty and courage. There is certainly no lack of either about this idyll of Elizabeth Kemp of the lissome limbs and auburn hair. The story pursues its way, and one sees the soul of a woman shining clearly through the racy dialect and frolics of the Chingford beano, the rueful futility of faithful Thomas and the engaging callousness of Liza's mother. Somerset Maugham's next study in female portraiture showed how far he could travel towards perfection. Mrs. Craddock, which is often called his best book, is a sex satire punctuated by four curtains, two of comedy and two of tragedy. This mixture of opposites should have been enough to damn it in the eyes of a public intent upon classifying everything by means of labels and of making everything so classified stick to its label like grim death. Yet the unclassified may flourish, and does, when its merit is beyond dispute. Mrs. Craddock appeared fully a decade before its time, when Victorian influences were still alive, and the modern idea for well to do women to have something to justify their existence was still in the nature of a novelty. Even in the fuller light of experience, Maugham could hardly have bettered his study of an impulsive and exigent woman, rising at the outset to the height of a bold and womanly choice in defiance of social prejudice and family tradition, and then relapsing under the disillusions of marriage into the weakest failings of her class, rising again, from a self-torturing neurotic into a kind of Niobe at the death of her baby. The ironic key of the book is at its best, in the passage half way through-- "Mr. Craddock's principles, of course, were quite right; he had given her plenty of run and ignored her cackle, and now she had come home to roost. There is nothing like a knowledge of farming, and an acquaintance with the habits of domestic animals, to teach a man how to manage his wife." =vi= As a playwright Mr. Maugham is quite as well known as he is for his novels. The author of Lady Frederick, Mrs. Dot, and Caroline--the creator of Lord Porteous and Lady Kitty in The Circle--writes his plays because it amuses him to do so and because they supply him with an excellent income. Here is a good story: It seems that Maugham had peddled his first play, Lady Frederick, to the offices of seventeen well-known London managers, until it came to rest in the Archives of the Court Theatre. The Court Theatre, standing in Sloane Square near the Tube station, is definitely outside the London theatre area, but as the scene of productions by the Stage Society, it is kept in the running. However, it might conceivably be the last port of call for a worn manuscript. It so happened that Athole Stewart, the manager of the Court Theatre, found himself needing a play very badly during one season. The theatre had to be kept open and there was nothing to keep it open with. From a dingy pile of play manuscripts he chose Lady Frederick. He had no hopes of its success--or so it is said--but the success materialised. At the anniversary of Lady Frederick in London, Maugham thought of asking to dinner the seventeen managers who rejected the play, but realising that no man enjoyed being reminded of a lost opportunity he decided to forgo the pleasure. The circumstances in which Caroline was written give an interesting reflex on Maugham as an artist. This delicious comedy was put on paper while Maugham was acting as British agent in Switzerland during the war. Some of its more amusing lines were written in some haste while a spy (of uncertain intentions toward Maugham) stood outside in the snow. =vii= Someone, probably the gifted Hector MacQuarrie, whom I fear I have guiltily been quoting in almost every sentence of this chapter, has said that Maugham writes "transcripts, not of life as a tolerable whole, but of phases which suit his arbitrary treatment." It is an enlightening comment. But Maugham himself is the keenest appraiser of his own intentions in his work, as when he spoke of the stories in his book, The Trembling of a Leaf, as not short stories, but "a study of the effect of the Islands of the Pacific on the white man." The man never stays still. When you think the time is ripe for him triumphally to tour America--when The Moon and Sixpence has attracted the widest attention--he insists on going immediately to China. This may be because, though well set up, black-eyed, broad-framed and excessively handsome in evening clothes, he is rather diffident. NOVELS: PLAYS: SOURCES ON W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM Who's Who [In England]. Somerset Maugham in Tahiti: Hitherto unpublished article by Hector MacQuarrie. THE BOOKMAN (London). Private information. _ |
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