"I have never begun a novel with more misgivings. If I call it an novel it is only because I don't know what else to call it. I have a little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage...". Somerset Maugham is delightfully disingenuous in introducing his 1944 novel, his last great success; he knows exactly what he is doing. He remains present throughout as observer, catalyst, and occasional participant, shunting himself onto the sidelines, quite disclaiming the tight control he keeps on his material. Even at the end, he apologizes: "I looked back in my mind's eye on my long narrative to see if there was any way in which I could devise a more satisfactory ending." And yet, he realizes, he has in fact "written nothing more nor less than a success story. For all the persons with whom I had been concerned got what they wanted." Quickly, he lists them, and he is absolutely right: it is a perfect ending. But the values by which those individual lives are measured differ in every case, and that is what gives the book its profound moral significance: how should we judge the ends to which a life should aspire?
Unusually for him, Maugham peoples his story mostly with American characters, even though he apologizes for not getting the voice quite right. I think he does this to have one pattern for worldly success ready made: the American pursuit of money. The novel opens in Chicago in 1919. Maugham, the author-narrator, visits an older friend Elliott Templeton, an aesthete and inveterate snob who has built a position in Europe as covert art dealer and social host. He introduces the writer to his sister and her daughter Isabel Bradley, a beauty of nineteen. She is engaged to marry Larry Darrell, a war hero recently returned from service as a fighter pilot. Larry has all sorts of positions open to him in the burgeoning world of Chicago finance, but has delayed a decision for so long that Isabel's family is getting worried. Begging for more time, he moves to Paris to find himself, and eventually the action shifts to Europe completely.
Maugham treats the American characters with a touch of mostly-affectionate satire. He revels in baroque flamboyance with Elliott Templeton, and dissects Isabel Bradley with a fine mixture of admiration and venom, though he is perhaps a little ham-fisted in portraying Gray Maturin (her other suitor) as the epitome of an American businessman-jock. The single exception is Larry Darrell, whom he presents entirely straight. As the action moves in snapshots through the twenties through the Wall Street crash and gradual recovery, Larry drops in and out, going his own way, which takes him from a coal mine in Flanders to an ashram in India. It becomes clear that he is seeking some kind of goodness, some meaning to life, and eventually we suspect we are in the presence of a kind of saint. But Maugham does not make him entirely an ascetic. As Maugham presents a world increasingly marked by excess -- contrasting the social heights with the depths of sex, drink, and drugs -- Larry retains the ability to move easily in any environment, although he does not always succeed in his attempts to do good.
THE RAZOR'S EDGE was a major success; perhaps Larry's search for meaning struck a chord with readers faced with the meaninglessness of war. This was the period when Maugham's younger contemporary Graham Greene was beginning his own series of books about spirituality and redemption, from
BRIGHTON ROCK
in 1938 to
THE END OF THE AFFAIR
in 1951. But the extreme compression of the latter points to the one aspect that I find least satisfactory in Maugham's novel: that he could not seem to decide whether he was painting a fresco of high life or engraving a detailed portrait of the protagonist who rejects it. Yes, I can see the care with which the author has balanced his characters -- for instance having Elliott Templeton bank spiritual credit by building a church and furnishing it with antiquities as a favor to the Pope, while Larry mortifies himself by working in a coal mine -- but I would have preferred more concentration on spirituality than wealth.
Finally, I have a personal reason for being drawn to this book. My father returned from WW1 also as a decorated hero, and he also (though less spectacularly) rejected the openings that his family expected of him. Instead, he too wandered the world in search for higher meaning, leading to a religious conversion some time in his thirties. This twenty-year period occurred, of course, before I was born. Perhaps because of his traumas, my father never spoke of it, and it remains a dark hole in my understanding of him. Maugham's novel goes far to shed some light.
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Although listed as new it was disgusting,dirty and torn. Paragraphs were even underlined?
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Simpering and mincing on the cote de azure
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