At the behest of an insistent friend many summers back, think back to an era when that petty tyrant Indira Gandhi and that pee-drinker Morarji Desai were leaders of our former nation, we read Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale although we can’t remember a whit now.
Our interest in Maugham was rekindled this week by the review of a new biography of this popular British author in the latest issue of the New Yorker (May 31, 2010, p.70-75).
If you are curious, Selina Hastings is the writer of the new biography The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (Random House).
In her review of Hastings’ book, the New Yorker reviewer Ruth Franklin provides an adequate introduction to both the man and his principal works: Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence and The Razor’s Edge.
Our appetite for Maugham whetted by the review, we picked up The Moon and Sixpence from our local library.
While this is not a full-fledged review of The Moon and Sixpence, suffice it to say that the book makes for interesting reading.
The short novel (a mere 195-pages) has as its central focus a 40-year-old London stock-broker called Charles Strickland, a ”good, dull, honest plain man’ who one day, without any previous signal, abandons his wife and two children and vamooses off to Paris.
Not besotted with a girl much younger in years than his wife or worse, fleeing from the police after a heinous crime, no, our red-haired, seemingly commonplace Strickland is in pursuit of a fancy that few can easily grasp – You see, he wants to paint.
As he explains to the narrator, who is dispatched on a mission to Paris by Mrs.Strickland, to get her husband back:
You blasted fool….I tell you I’ve got to paint. I can’t help myself. When a man falls into the water it doesn’t matter how he swims, well or badly: he’s got to get out or else he’ll drown.
Maugham traces the arc of Strickland’s unusual life from London to Paris to Marseilles and finally to the tragic end in Tahiti.
And he does it very well in the voice of the narrator, a writer. The book bubbles with humor and Maugham imbues even lesser characters with a rich color that makes them memorable.
Maugham is a perceptive observer of the human character, particularly on matters of love, women, men and beauty.
His incisive observations on these topics are evident in the following excerpts from the book:
On Women/On Love
There is no cruelty greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation. P. 100-101
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her…but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account. P. 126
When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possess your soul. Because she’s weak, she has a rage for Continue reading »
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