The Summing Up - W Somerset Maugham

 The Summing Up is not an autobiography, albeit it is the only source of autobiographical facts you are get from Somerset Maugham, and the main source of everybody else's biography of Maugham.  Written in 1938, when he was in his early sixties, it is a book of thoughts and reflections on a life which he assumed was coming to an end when in fact he had another thirty years to go.   As such it is unusual and fascinating.   I was fascinated by his thoughts on the theatre (it is often forgotten nowadays that Maugham was the most successful dramatist of his time) and his time as a British Intelligence agent in WW1 (see my review of Ashenden below).  But actually the most absorbing part for me turned out to be the finally 20% on Maugham's philosophy, agnosticism and mysticism.  These are not matters which usually concern me but Maugham managed to hook me in.   He sets out all his workings and makes a very persuasive case.

An excellent book, highly recommended.

Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess

 Some say Earthly Powers (1980) was Burgess's masterpiece, though I prefer the Enderby series and the Malay Trilogy.  A Clockwork Orange is always the book he will be best known for, though I disliked it on my most recent reading.  However, Earthly Powers was written to land Burgess the Big Book Prize, which as I recall it didn't.

It is a massive undertaking, by far Burgess's longest book.  Its size means that Burgess has to tune down experimentation and tackle the more usual novelistic tropes of character development and long story arcs.  He does this, it has to be said, remarkably well.  It was a typical Burgess clever stroke to base his protagonist, Kenneth M Toomey, on William Somerset Maugham, another very famous, extremely successful novelist and playwright whose success prevented his artistry being recognised in his lifetime.  I told a good friend I had been reading and enjoying Maugham; he suggested I should read Earthly Powers.

Toomey isn't Maugham; he is homosexual like Maugham, ex-pat, successful in books and plays and films, but he isn't just Maugham under a different name.  He is a Maugham-like character who finds himself subsumed into family and religion and, through them, dragged into significant events of the first eighty years of the twentieth century (in a way that Maugham, to the best of my recollection, wasn't).

His sister Hortense marries a young Italian composer whose brother is a priest.  Toomey has by this time rejected the Catholic church of his upbringing, which condemns him as a homosexual.  Domenico Campanati goes to Hollywood to write the score of dozens of motion pictures; Carlo Campanati becomes bishop of Milan and, ultimately, Pope Gregory XVII.  None of this is spoiler: we know Carlo is pope because the novel starts with Toomey, after Gregory's death, being approached at his house in Malta to write an account of an apparent miracle he saw Carlo Campanati perform in a US hospital.  The twist that comes from that event would absolutely be a spoiler - but I had no idea it was coming, and it really dropped my jaw.  The twist, on its own, would be worth reading Earthly Powers for.  But there is so much else.  The characters are magnificent; the literary wordplay that Burgess just cannot resist; and the sheer scope of the story.

Earthly Powers didn't win the Booker, William Goldings' Rites of Passage did.  I have now enjoyed them both.  I suspect Golding is slightly superior in purely literary terms, which explains why a Maugham-based novel came second.  As novels, though, they are equally magnificent.

The Painted Veil - Somerset Maugham

 

In this novel from 1925 Maugham's theme is coming to terms with adulthood and the development of empathy.  Kitty Garstin is a pretty, middleclass girl, favoured by her parents because she's prettier than her younger sister Dorothy.  But plain Dorothy gets engaged first, which Kitty takes as something of a slur on her, so she accepts the first proposal that comes along - from a talented, decent-looking young bacteriologist called Walter Fane.  She barely knows him, doesn't really like him let alone love him, but he does have the advantage of a posting in Hong Kong.

Once in the colony Kitty soon gets bored and plunges into an affair with Charlie Townsend, the Colonial Secretary.  He's an older man, horribly vain and self-centred, but Kitty is infatuated and, at the same time, relishes betraying her dull husband.  Walter finds out and, icy-cold, issues an ultimatum.  Either she comes with him to a cholera-ridden city up-country or he'll divorce her, ruin her reputation and, more importantly, Townsend's prospects of ever becoming governor.  Kitty assumes Townsend will throw up his career and run away with her.  Of course he won't.  He loves his life and is deeply attached to his plain, undemanding wife.

So Kitty goes with Walter, not caring if she lives or dies.  The city really is hell - the dead lie in the streets, the military is trying to organise things, and the only functioning healthcare centre is a French nunnery.  Kitty meets a strange, prematurely bald little man called Waddington, the deputy commissioner in the area.  He is deeply immersed in the community and knows everything about everyone.  He introduces Kitty to the nuns who absolutely revere Walter for his work and effort.  Kitty has no education and no real talent, but she can help out by looking after the abandoned Chinese girls.  Initially they are ugly little monsters to her, but then she recognises their humanity.  She visits Waddington at home and finds out he lives, unmarried, with a Mandarin noblewoman - a double outsider in Southern China - who is utterly devoted to him.  As Kitty discovers the humanity in others, so she finds it within herself.  She realises she is pregnant.  Is it Townsend's or is it Walter's?  Townsend doesn't matter to her any more.  Having seen Walter with babies dying of cholera she knows he will accept the child (she's convinced it will be a girl) and love it.  She aches to tell him - but Walter catches the cholera (he may have been experimenting on himself) and dies.

Kitty has to return to Hong Kong, where she is met by Dorothy Townsend, who is every bit as caring and charitable as everyone says she is.  For a time, at Dorothy's insistence, Kitty lives in the Townsend home.  Charlie tries it on, of course, but gets his come-uppance.  Kitty finally takes control of her life and goes home to London.  Her father, whom she has never really appreciated, has accepted a post in the West Indies.  His wife has died while Kitty was en route home.  Kitty, now properly adult, pledges to go with him.

A delightful book, written in eighty very short chapters yet deeply incisive, with wonderfully rounded, compulsive characters.  I enjoyed The Magician more, because it's my kind of story, but The Painted Veil is a much better book - on a par with The Moon and Sixpence.

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The Magician - Somerset Maugham

 

Despite living until 1965, Maugham was essentially an Edwardian novelist.  This, from 1908, is him dipping a toe into the world of James's Turn of the Screw; in other words, fin du siecle gothic.  Maugham was also a novelist who turned personal experience into fiction.  He had encountered Aleister Crowley, "The Wickedest Man in the World", and despised him.  Crowley is Oliver Haddo, the Magician of the title.  In Parisian bohemia he comes across Margaret and Arthur, Arthur a successful London physician, Margaret his beautiful ward whom he intends to marry as soon as she turns eighteen. Today, this raises eyebrows, and Maugham was clearly aware of it, even in 1908.  He goes to great lengths to demonstrate that their love is romantic and true.  Haddo spitefully takes Margaret from Arthur and marries her.  She briefly returns to Arthur but cannot resist the animal magnetism of Haddo.  Arthur with his friends Suzie and Porhoet determine to rescue her from Haddo's ancestral pile in Staffordshire.

Maugham is a much better novelist than posthumous neglect would indicate.  He wrote The Magician at the height of his powers, midway between Liza of Lambeth and Of Human Bondage.  He has devised a gothic plot and come up with some extremely clever ways of making it credible.  The characters are in a constant state of flux.  Haddo gets fatter and fatter with every appearance; Margaret goes from English rose to debauched jade and finally a pale shadow of her former self; Arthur and Suzie, from the start an obvious match in age and two halves of a whole in terms of personality, slowly get younger and more attractive as they grow closer.  The end, when it came, was genuinely horrific.  A mini masterpiece of the genre, which deserves to better known.

Don Fernando - W Somerset Maugham

Don Fernando is a book about a book that never happened. It is billed as a travel book but it is really about travel in the mind and Maugham doesn't visit that many of the places discussed. Those he does go to are only described as they once were, in the Golden Age of Spain. Maugham's putative protagonist would have lived in the Golden Age and his picaresque adventures would have brought him into the orbit of those who made it golden - Cervantes, Ignatius Loyola, Saint Theresa, El Greco.

In the end he gets distracted by a painting of an English monk posing as an English saint. The face becomes the face of his character and the persona he builds is therefore English rather than Spanish and thus he cannot write his novel. Instead he writes this, first in 1935 then completely revised in 1950. It is a wonderful read. Maugham's mind is so fertile, his writing so elegant. I especially enjoyed his thoughts on the Spanish theatre (the only real Spanish theatre before the mid 20th century) of Lope da Vega and Calderon. Theatre is my specialty, of course, but I was also fascinated by his exploration of mysticism during the Counter Reformation (which is by no means my specialty).

The Razor's Edge - Somerset Maugham

The sharp edge of a razor is hard to pass over; thus the wise say the road to salvation is hard." (Upanishad)

The Razor's Edge (1944) is said to be Maugham's last great novel. It came as a shock to me, who remembers Maugham's death being announced on the BBC News in 1965, to realise that by 1944 he had been a novelist for almost half a century. No wonder then that his prose is beautiful yet simple, utterly devoid of cliche. What is more remarkable is the structure, which borders on the experimental. In the very first section he tells us that this is a novel, based on fact, that will not have a conventional ending. He - Maugham - remains the narrator and makes it very clear that this is a close approximation of the real Maugham and (just once) he is even called Maugham by one of the other characters. Who they really are, beneath the false names he has given them, is neither explained nor hinted at; he tells us we would not know them, they are not famous people.

They are however glamorous people, as Maugham himself was supremely glamorous by that point. He starts just after World War I in America. Maugham is already famous and wealthy enough to roam the world at will.  Through his friend Elliott Templeton, a snobbish, effete American ex-pat, he is introduced to the Bradley family. Mrs Bradley is Elliott's sister, the widow of a middling US diplomat. Her daughter Isabel is a coltish adolescent hopelessly in love with Larry Darrell, who lied about his age to fly in the war. Isabel is doted on by Gray Maturin whose father is a millionaire stock broker. Also present is a younger girl, Sophie Macdonald.

And that is basically it. Maugham narrates his encounters with these people over the next twenty years. He tells us when he is reconstructing conversations and events he only heard about but did not witness. There is a vast amount of travel and a hell of a lot of conversation. Elliott becomes increasingly flamboyant and ridiculous but is always saved by fundamental goodness of heart. Isabel almost marries Larry but ends up marrying Gray, whose fortunes rise and fall with the Crash of '29. Larry almost marries Sophie but doesn't.

So what is it all about? Maugham, of course, witnessed the war and the human damage first hand with the Ambulance Corps. He understands something of the lost generation but is too old and too British to understand the repercussions for the American Dream. This is what he explores. Larry never recovers; he avoids all responsibility, professes no ambition, commercial or academic, but instead wanders the world in menial jobs in the search for 'meaning'. Isabel meanwhile clings to the battered remnants of the Dream like a tigress. Sophie lets it all overwhelm her. In the end, nothing is resolved. Elliott and Sophie die, Gray gets back into business, and Larry vanishes, his quest unresolved. Maugham is the only one left in Europe.

One key section towards the end is an interminable evening in a French cafe in which Larry tells Maugham about his time spent on the ashram of an Indian mystic. This is in fact Maugham's own story. It was he who really visited the ashram of the enlightened guru Sri Ramana Maharshi. Did he find meaning or peace? He doesn't say. This is a novel, not autobiography. And it is a wonderful novel, surely a Twentieth Century classic. It encompasses that quest for meaning in the face of mechanized war and unrestrained capitalism which was surely the driving force of all art in the last century.