It's been three weeks since my last post, three weeks very well spent as I've been reading Maugham's first indisputable masterpiece, Of Human Bondage, published in 1915 but written on the eve of World War I. It's a coming of age story written by a man of forty. It ends with Philip's marriage as he is coming up to thirty; Maugham turned forty in January 1914 and was not yet married, though he was in a relationship with the woman he would marry (Syrie, daughter of Dr Barnardo, no less, and until 1916 still married to the US pharmaceutical millionaire Henry Wellcome); in September 1915 Syrie gave birth to Maugham's daughter, Liza.
Philip Carey is Maugham in all but name. Orphaned at an early age, he is brought up in Kent by his eldery uncle and aunt. He is educated at the thinly disguised Canterbury School, and later in Heidelberg. After a dismal apprenticeship in accountancy he trains as a doctor in London. There is a period as a would-be artist in Paris which Maugham did not do. Maugham, however, was born in Paris and spent his first ten years there.
Maugham, today, is claimed as a forerunner of gay emancipation. In 1915 England that was totally illegal. Maugham deals with the tendency in Philip masterfully. Philip has a crush on boys at school and is reluctant to get involved with women as a young man. He feels, as Maugham clearly did, that he ought to marry. The first woman he falls for is a waitress in a teashop called Mildred. She is pretty but dull. She only tolerates Philip because he is a gentleman and is willing to spend money on her. She treats him appallingly and runs off with another man. She turns up pregnant and abandoned. Philip takes her in on a platonic basis and bonds with the child, a baby girl. Then he discovers that Mildred is getting an income as a prostitute. Later, as a trainee medic at a hospital in one of the poorer parts of Victorian London, Philip diagnoses a terrible disease in Mildred. He abandons her, loses money on a share deal because of a slump caused by the Boer War, and is reduced to working as a shopwalker until his uncle dies and his small inheritance enables him to complete his medical studies.
So far as we know, none of this happened to Maugham. The emotional backbone of the novel is entirely him coming into his own as a master of his craft. The other difference with Philip is that he has a club foot. Maugham was bullied because he had a bad stammer. Some critics say that Philip's foot is a metaphor for Maugham's sexuality. I say that's wishful thinking. Maugham gives his hero a visible physical defect because reiterating a stammer bad enough to be a serious problem would be tedious to do in a modern novel with lots of dialogue and because most people, then and now, do not appreciate how restrictive a speech problem can be.
Of Human Bondage is a long novel with 600 pages and a hundred-and-something chapters. It was a transitional work for Maugham and is a transitional novel from Victorian literature to a Modern Englsh form. It really is a masterpiece, well worth a couple of weeks of anyone's time.
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