BOOKS

THE GREAT AND THE GOOD

Somerset Maugham 's sense of vocation.

BY RUTH FRANKLIN 

In Somerset Maugham's novel "The Moon and Sixpence," there is a scene in which Dirk Stroeve, a painter, visits an art dealer to inquire after the work of another artist, Charles Strickland, whose paintings he has persuaded the dealer to take on. Stroeve is himself a mediocre painter of blatantly commercial landscapes and peasant scenes, unrepentant about his lack of originality. "I don't pretend to be a great painter," he says early on, "but I have something. I sell." Yet he recognizes Strickland's work as genius. He tells the dealer, "Remember Monet, who could not get anyone to buy his pictures for a hundred francs. What are they worth now?" The dealer questions this logic. "There were a hundred as good painters as Monet who couldn't sell their pictures at that time, and their pictures are worth nothing still. How can one tell? Is merit enough to bring success?" Stroeve is infuriated. "How, then, will you recognize merit?" he asks. ''There is only one way - by success," the dealer replies. '' Think of all the great artists of the past - Raphael, Michael Angelo, Ingres, Delacroix - they were all successful."
Success came easily to Maugham, whose career embodies the vexing questions implicit in Stroeve's argument with the art dealer: how do we recognize artistic merit, and what relation, if any, does it have to popularity? It is difficult to think of another writer whose work was once so ubiquitous and is now so thoroughly absent from the contemporary literary canon. As Selina Hasttings writes in her new biography, 'The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham" (Random House; $35)- the title is somewhat sensational, given that most of Maugham's secrets have been open for some time - Maugham was for much of his life "the most famous writer in the world." He once had four productions running simultaneously in London's West End, his novels were best-sellers in England and America, and his works have been adapted for film and television more than ninety times. He spent his later years in style, in a villa on the French Riviera, and his death, in 1965, at the age of ninety-one, was front-page news in Europe and America. Yet during the seven years I spent studying English literature at two universities, three decades later, I do not recall anyone, professor or student, ever mentioning his work.
Maugham's critical acclaim was always more uneven than his commercial success. Theodore Dreiser championed "Of Human Bondage," but English critics, particularly the Bloomsbury literary elite, were largely uninterested in Maugham. (He paid them back in his fiction by invariably portraying critics, bitterly and hilariously, as opportunistic philistines.) Joseph Conrad wrote snidely of Maugham's first novel that the author "just looks on-and that is just what the general reader prefers."
When he was praised, it was for his technical skill rather than for his psychological depth. "I do not know of any living writer who seems to have his work so much under control," Evelyn Waugh once wrote. In a devastating piece on Maugham for this magazine in 1946, Edmund Wilson said, "I have never been able to convince myself that he was anything but second-rate." Such criticism seems to have carried a particular sting for Maugham, perhaps because it coincided precisely with his own self-deprecating assessments. In his autobiography, "The Summing Up," published in 1938, when he was sixty-four, he explained, "I discovered my limitations and it seemed to me that the only sensible thing was to aim at what excellence I could within them." These limitations, as he saw them, included "small power of imagination," "no lyrical quality," and "little gift of metaphor": "I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed."
There is more than a hint of the English gentleman's requisite modesty in these words - a gesture of self-criticism made from the comfortable vantage of success - and what appears to be soul-searching reflection may just be an advance parry against the critics' blows. But Maugham was right that his gift lay not in a striking style or in sweeping ambition but in the raw powers of observation and the glittering precision that he brought to his moral dramas. "It seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed," he once wrote, with his characteristic understatement. The devastating conditions of the poor in London slums, the eccentric characters populating remote colonial outposts of the South Pacific, the treacherously hypocritical upper class: always looking on, Maugham set their stories down-sometimes virtually unaltered-in his singularly unemotional style. Must a true artist be a visionary in the manner of Charles Strickland, an originator constantly in the process of "making it new"? Or is "making it real," however unfashionable, sometimes just as worthwhile? Fittingly, Maugham's obsession with the greatness of which he believed himself incapable occasionally spurred him to achieve it.
“One of the first things one learned about Somerset Maugham in London was that no one liked him very much," the journalist Drew Middleton wrote just after Maugham's death. The difficult ground of his life has been covered many times. Hastings's approach, though never hagiographic, is refreshingly sympathetic. Maugham was born in 1874 in France, to English parents, and grew up speaking French more fluently than English. Orphaned at the age of ten, he was shipped off to southeast England to live with his uncle, a vicar, and his wife. When he was at boarding school in Canterbury, the other boys abused him for his small size and his difficulties with English pronunciation, which developed into a fulllfledged stammer that was to plague him all his life. Hastings identifies as autobiographical the episode in "Of Human Bondage" in which Philip Carey, the author’s fictional alter ego, prays that God will cure him of his clubfoot. His disappointment is the first step in his loss of religious faith.
Most readers have assumed that Philip's clubfoot stands in for his creator's speech impediment, but Francis King, an English writer and a mend of Maugham's, argued that it was "a metaphor for a graver disability"-his sexual orientation. Maugham famously once said that as a young man he had thought that he was "three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer-whereas really it was the other way around." He did have relationships with women and, in 1917, married Syrie Wellcome, who had become pregnant with his child while still married to her first husband; Maugham was named in the divorce proceedings. Homosexuality was more than a hindrance in turn-of-the-century England. It could send a man to jail: Oscar Wilde's trial for "gross indecency" took place in 1895, when Maugham was twenty-one. By that point, he had already spent some time studying in Heidelberg, where he absorbed influences as diverse as Pater, Ibsen, and Schopenhauer. After his return to London, he took up medical studies. Training among the poor in London’s slums, he found himself fascinated by the people and their stories, which inspired his first novel, "Liza of Lambeth," published in 1897, about the life and death of an eighteen-year-old factory worker. "I caught the colloquial note by instinct," he wrote later.
From the start, Maugham approached writing as a profession, earning a living being his first priority. He had no illusions about his early work: a letter to his agent accompanying three short stories called one of them "bad enough to suit anything." He turned to playwriting, because it was lucrative, and because, as he later claimed, he found it easier "to set down on paper the things people said than to construct a narrative." Maugham is again selling his talent short: it was not every writer who could sit down and dash off a top-rate comedy within a month. "His acute intelligence enabled him to gauge what his audiences wanted," Hastings writes, and "his expert craftsmanship delivered it." And what the audiences wanted was the kind of witty, urbane society drama for which he became famous. But after a remarkable run of eight hit plays-he eventually wrote more than two dozen-the novel pulled him back. Maugham began writing "Of Human Bondage" in 1911; it was published in 1915. The ease with which he had found success as a playwright perhaps instilled in him the mistrust of pure facility that became a recurrent preoccupation in his novels.
In a foreword to the novel, Maugham notes that it had a first life as a shorter book, called 'The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey," which he had written at the age of twenty-three. He is relieved now that it was not published, he says, because he would then have "lost a subject which I was too young to make proper use of" "Of Human Bondage" is autobiographical, he says, but not autobiography: "Fact and fiction are inextricably mingled; the emotions are my own, but not all the incidents are related as they happened." Despite this caution, critics and biographers have mostly read at least the first part of the novel as drawn directly from Maugham's life-the early death of the mother, the icy vicar, the torturous school experience, and then the escape to Heidelberg, where Philip is first exposed to aesthetic experience. The parallels break down as Philip reaches adulthood, which is also where the novel begins to take shape as a masterpiece.
After failing as an accountant, Philip flees to Paris, where he spends two years studying to be a painter and living la vie bohème. Maugham depicts the world of the art students with the fondly satirical eye of an older man who can no longer take his younger self quite seriously. Philip grows his hair, learns to drink absinthe, and spends evenings in seedy cafes debating the purpose of art, butt like most of his circle-he turns out not to have much talent. 'What does it matter if your picture is good or bad?" his friend Clutton, the only gifted painter among them, asks him. "The only reason that one paints is that one can't help it." But Philip, like his creator, knows that he lacks this kind of passion; his talent, he worries, lies in nothing more than "a superficial cleverness of the hand." When he abandons art to enter medical school, it is with a sense of relief.
The true originality of the novel, and the reason many critics were taken aback by it, lies in the miserable, mildly sadomasochistic love affair between Philip and a waitress, Mildred, which begins soon after he returns to London. An odd and unattractive love object, she has a "chlorotic color" brought on by anemia, thin pale lips, "narrow hips and the chest of a boy." (It has been universally assumed that this episode is based on an unhappy relationship the young Maugham had with a man.) She affects pretentious manners to disguise her lower-class background, and her conversation is superficial. At her warmest, she is merely indifferent to Philip, but when she's in a bad mood her contempt for him manifests itself in cruelty:

He was not happy with her, but he was unhappy away from her. He wanted to sit by her side and look at her, he wanted to touch her; he wanted ... the thought came to him and he did not finish it, suddenly he grew wide awake ... he wanted to kiss the thin, pale mouth with its narrow lips. The truth