“Each one of us is alone in the world."

“There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses - bound for dust – mortal - ” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

The Moon and Sixpence – W. Somerset Maugham

This 1919 novel stars an artist who exemplifies the disaffection and disgruntlement some people felt with the modern world even before World War I. It tells the story of middle-aged Charles Strickland, a prosperous English stockbroker who decides he must paint what he sees. So, to pursue his creative vision, he chucks his job and settles in a comfortless garret in Paris. Strickland leaves his wife to find her own financial security. He leaves the cost of educating his son at Oxford to his brother-in-law. He makes money for rent by showing English tourists the seamy side of Paris. He spends more on paint and canvas than on bread and milk. He doesn’t get high. He doesn’t care about comfort, friends, or women. He doesn’t even care about reputation or sales. As a genuine starving artist, he focuses on pursuing the vision, so much so that the quest takes him to Tahiti, about as far from Europe as you can go. He’s a grubby person, ruining lives thoughtlessly, but a great artist.

Maugham's brand of modernism-lite expressed itself not in his no-frills style. His flat prose is extremely readable, with a consistent mannered tone (rise superior to adversity/obstacles/distress; occasion despondency), though some word choices will pull us up short:

Strickland was just the man to rise superior to circumstances, when they were such as to occasion despondency in most; but whether this was due to equanimity of soul or to contradictoriness it would be difficult to say.

Cussedness? Contrariness would have been more homely and more Biblical at the same time, yes? “Her laughter was the most catching I ever heard;” Contagious, yes; infectious, yes; catching makes us wonder, “Did he mean fetching?” “Age and obesity had made her inapt for love” Unsuitable for falling in love? Clumsy at making love? Unlikely to attract a lover?

Maugham’s first language was French so we find sometimes sentences like:

He recognises in himself an artistic satisfaction in the contemplation of evil which a little startles him; but sincerity forces him to confess that the disapproval he feels for certain actions is not nearly so strong as his curiosity in their reasons.

Which a little startles him? Curiosity in? And that’s not the only unidiomatic preposition either.  I quibble, since I raised my hand, recognizing my patronage when Edmund Wilson damned Maugham as “a half-trashy novelist, who writes badly, but is patronized by half-serious readers, who do not care much about writing.”

Irony is a familiar marker of literary modernity. Maugham uses two narrators, paradoxically the same guy. The first is a young aspiring writer, unsure how to make his way among so-called adults in supposedly grown-up messes. The second is the same writer, but viewing his younger self ironically, finding his world-weary tone immature and pretentious but endearing. It’s jaded and melancholy in a self-conscious way:

… I did not realise how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

I think the narrator is Maugham himself (as in The Razor’s Edge). He was raised by his austere Uncle Henry, vicar of Whitstable in Kent. Our young narrator says, “I adopted the tone used by my Uncle Henry, a clergyman, when he was asking one of his relatives for a subscription to the Additional Curates Society.”

Experimenting – a little – with modernist narrative technique, Maugham has Strickland leave Paris for Tahiti. Then the narrator has to interview witnesses to get secondhand stories about the artist. So we get the dubious multiple points of view modernism is known for.

In fact, the narrator fesses up to his own unreliability. Even as he delivers his first-person participant account of Strickland’s life, he concedes that he is fallible, confused, and his information incomplete, his analysis faulty. When he says, “I do not know how to express precisely the impression he made upon me,” we cut him slack, experiencing the familiar feeling of struggling for words to describe our own thoughts and feelings about ourselves to ourselves and others. As for figuring out other people, the narrator asks, “How did I know what were the thoughts and emotions behind that placid brow and those cool gray eyes?” Indeed, how the hell do we know?

And what’s more modernist than identifying the ambiguities and having doubts about the conventional wisdom? Our narrator tosses out the old adages: “The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly.” Not to mention the blameless getting burned. And we work in vain if we think we can dig down deep enough to find ultimate meaning. “There is no last word,” the narrator says. No one really knew Strickland, who didn’t talk clearly about his motives anyway. Instead of reducing the complexity of a life to “Rosebud,” better to enjoy life and art, in a light spirit of satire without giving in to cynicism, bitterness or cruelty, especially to one’s self.

“Nature, sometimes so cruel,” intones the narrator, “is sometimes merciful.” Funny, both writers would go pale when mentioned in the same sentence but it calls to mind a really different novel also released in 1919 in which a character says “I would trust myself to Providence, for, as Blenkiron used to say, Providence was all right if you gave him a chance.” Nature a.k.a. Providence a.k.a. Fate – in a universe where a random exposure to galactic cosmic rays can devastate a cell’s nucleus and cause mutations that can result in cancer, whaddaya gonna do?

Anyway, this novel seems to be one by Maugham that is less frequently read nowadays though its “explore your possibilities, follow your heart, pursue your passion, believe in yourself, never give up” message is totally consistent with popular self-help and inspiration like The Alchemist.  I think if a reader liked Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge or Ashenden, they’d probably like this one. Maugham was more comfortable with realist techniques like John Galsworthy, but as an artist he was intrigued enough by some modernist techniques to use them in his own work and as a professional writer he knew using them was necessary to get some critical respect and goose sales among hard-core readers like us, people who read for pleasure, with some pretentions to taste – our own taste, which we reserve the right not to defend.