Mrs Craddock - W Somerset Maugham

 

Mrs Craddock was the third or fourth of Maugham's novels, written in 1900 but not published until 1902 - because William Heinemann, of all people, thought it was in some inexplicable way offensive.   He agreed to publish a slightly expurgated version but since 1955 we have all had the real deal.   And there is nothing in any way offensive about it.

This is Maugham's attempt at a New Woman Novel.   The New Woman was a literary genre in the last decade of the Victorian era, sparked by suffragism and various campaigns for womens' rights.   It found expression in 'Theodora: A Fragment' by 'Victoria Cross' in The Yellow Book and the publisher of that journal, John Lane of The Bodley Head, launched a series of books on the theme called Keynotes after the first in the series, a novel of the same name by 'George Egerton' (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright).   Two notable works in the series were The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen, and The Woman Who Didn't by the aforementioned 'Victoria Cross' (Anna Sophie Cory.

Because of the difficulty in getting Mrs Craddock into print Maugham missed the crest of the New Woman wave.   Nevertheless it was a success and in many ways cemented the reputation he made with his debut Liza of Lambeth five years earlier.   The intervening novels, The Making of a Saint and The Hero, hadn't done especially well and Maugham was still searching for his central theme.   He found it in the question of quiet nonconformity.

Bertha Ley is a New Woman.   Coming up to twenty-one, and about to come into a comfortable inheritance, she forms a passionate attachment to the young farmer, Edward Craddock, one of her tenants.   She is determined to marry him immediately and no one can persaude her otherwise.   Her aunt, a middleaged spinster and a woman of independent opinions, sees no point in trying.   The marriage goes ahead and for a time Bertha is blissfully happy as Mrs Craddock.   Edward is an excellent manager of the estate and she finds him physically irresistable.   But she loses her baby son after a nightmare confinement.   The local doctor warns her she can never have another.   Edward does his duty but Bertha cannot recover her passion for him.   So she leaves him and goes to London to lodge with her aunt.

Ultimately Bertha returns to her family home in Whitstable where Edward has simply got on with things in her absence.   Things about him that Bertha once found attractive - his manly appetite, his old-fashioned code of behaviour, his lack of sophistication - she now finds offensive.   Edward is putting on weight, balding slightly, and standing for the County Council.

Maugham handles it all brilliantly.   Bertha is compulsive and irritating.   Edward is dogged and dull.   The character who holds the narrative together, acting as the reader's voice, is Bertha's aunt, Miss Polly Ley, who has actually been a New Woman since before the term was invented.   She lives alone in London and spends the unpleasant winter months abroad.   She has a busy social and intellectual life.   Her counter is another spinster, Fanny Glover, the vicar's devoted sister, who would have made Edward the perfect wife.

For me the proof of Maugham's genius is his ability to make his fiction exactly the right length - a few pages under 300 in this instance.   Unlike so many modern novelists he always seems to know precisely when to stop.

Of Human Bondage - W Somerset Maugham

 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.

Ashenden - W Somerset Maugham

Ashenden is said to be the fictive version of Maugham's experience as a semi-professional intelligence agent in World War I.  As a famous author, middleaged, and long-term expat, Maugham's presence in Switzerland, France and Italy was unquestioned.  As he famously sociable and civilised, he could easily mix with people of all sorts.  So, therefore, does Ashenden.

The fascinating thing for me was that some of the spies Ashenden tangles with in these stories are easily identified.  Guilia Lazzari, for example, is surely Mata Hari.  Others, I would love to be able to identify. Was Maugham really in Russia during the Kerensky government?  If so, who was Mr Harrington and who was Alexandra Alexandrovna?

Published in 1928, Ashenden is Maugham at the height of his powers.  The writing, characterisation and narrative structure are all superb.  To anyone who hasn't tried Maugham before, could there be a better introduction?  I think not.