It’s a preposterous attempt to live only for yourself and by yourself. Sooner or later you’ll be ill and tired and old, and then you’ll crawl back into the herd. Won’t you be ashamed when you feel in your heart the desire for comfort and sympathy? You’re trying an impossible thing. Sooner or later the human being in you will yearn for the common bonds of humanity.
I want to start with a note on the title (which does not appear in the novel). Apparently, a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement wrote of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage that its protagonist was "so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet”. I haven’t read any other Maugham, but this must be a common theme for him (if he reused the phrase as the title of this, his next book) and this quote about yearning “for the common bonds of humanity” seems to hearken back to “of human bondage” (making me think that Maugham wanted the reader to consider these novels together and I had a pleasantly informative time googling about Maugham and his writing and Gaugin and his art.) To the review proper:
Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.
Loosely based on the life of Paul Gaugin, The Moon and Sixpence has a narrator (whose life experiences are broadly those of Maugham himself) who finds himself crossing the path of a misanthropic painter over the course of his hermetic and uncelebrated career. I liked that the narrator only reports known facts — his own conversations with this Charles Strickland or conversations that he had with others about the man — and I liked the irony of him saying that if this were a novel he’d imagine a childhood backstory to explain the man’s prickly personality, or his apologies that he needed to invent dialogue for Strickland because so much of what the artist conveyed was in grunts and gestures. I don’t know if this was a common concept in 1919, but everything about the narrator (even quoting from invented biographies of Strickland) trying to add to the body of knowledge about a genius painter who wasn’t appreciated until after his death felt fresh and modern. As Strickland had left his job as a London stockbroker and abandoned his wife and children, at the age of forty, to pursue his painting, the question at the heart of this novel is: Does genius alone excuse a man for throwing off the bonds of humanity in order to pursue his passions outside the bounds of society? (As Maugham himself left his wife and child to explore the world with his gentleman companion/secretary/lover — travelling from Paris to Tahiti in the footsteps of Gaugin — he seems to be making the case for his own life as much as the painter’s; when Maugham writes about “artists”, he is obviously including himself.)
Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.
As much as the concept felt modern, the attitudes were very much of their time, with offputting racism, classism, and frequent misogyny. (It is not incidental that I wrote the question is about a man’s right to pursue his passions; Maugham [or at any rate, his narrator] does not seem to like the ladies very much.) Some representative passages:
• I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the death-bed of those they love. Sometimes it seems as if they grudge the longevity which postpones their chance of an effective scene.
• Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.
• “Women are strange little beasts,” he said to Dr. Coutras. “You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.”
(Perhaps even in 1919 the idea of Gaugin taking a thirteen year old Tahitian wife, while still married, was creepy; in this novel, Strickland’s bride is seventeen. Better?) From people not understanding Strickland's painting within his lifetime (such that he was always just one step ahead of starvation) to people kicking themselves for not buying up his work cheaply when they were deemed priceless masterpieces after his death, the point can be made that the genius was always present in the work; the pursuit of truth and beauty is its own reward, separate from the opinions of others:
The moral I draw is the artist should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in the release of the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.
Back to the title: Perhaps the true lesson is to support those who would ignore the sixpence at their feet in pursuit of the moon. This was a very compelling read (even if the racist bits were totally offputting) and I am interested in reading more from Maugham.
