The Razor’s Edge
– Somerset Maugham (1944)
The protagonist of this novel, Larry Darrell, has been traumatized
by his experience as a combat pilot in the ordeal of WWI and the death of his
closest friend who was killed in action while saving Larry’s life. Like many of
his contemporaries, Larry is examining the certainties and pieties that have
taken a beating due to the attempted suicide of Western civilization.
A razor’s edge is a dangerous position or a position in
which two different things are carefully balanced. As the novel starts in 1919,
Larry finds himself in a dangerous position. Other people are starting to write
him off as a loser since they believe he’s taking too long to make serious life
choices. Mr. Maturin and his son Grey
want him to work for their Chicago brokerage and spin millions. Mrs. Bradley
and her daughter Isabel want him to land a lucrative job and marry Isabel, all
vivacity and strapping embonpoint. Isabel’s uncle Elliott Templeton wants him to
do the family credit by cutting an alluring figure in fashionable society.
Larry however wants to balance what the world tells him he
should want, what his mind finds logical and reasonable, and what his heart and soul need. In other words, he’s on a quest to
identify whether a flourishing life in fact depends on wealth, property,
reputation, power, influence, praise, a stable marriage, happy family life, and
healthy gainfully-employed issue. Or he says:
I want to make up my mind
whether God is or God is not. I want to find out why evil exists. I want to
know whether I have an immortal soul or whether when I die it’s the end.
His quest to identify the hankerings of his spirit takes
him to Chicago, William
James, Paris and yogi Sri Ganesha in an ashram in the Himalayas.
Maugham
is not counted among the modernists like James, Conrad, Woolf and Joyce because
his writing was never experimental. The novel opens with the alarming
statement, "If I call this a novel it is only because I don't know what
else to call it.” Well, pops, what are we readers to make of it, if you don’t
what it is? It’s an odd statement from a successful author. Maugham, who in
1908 had four hit plays running at the same time, had shown multiple times by
1944 that he had a feeling for what kind of story would appeal to lots of
readers and sell like hot cakes.
But the reader leery of experimental fiction is quickly reassured
upon realizing Maugham once again uses his comprehensible prose style and
doesn’t ask more of readers than drawing inferences any thinking adult would be
up to. Maugham prided himself on his artless clarity, sniffing at subtle Jamesian
ambiguities. He said:
The author wraps his meaning in
mystery so that the vulgar shall not participate in it. His soul is a secret
garden into which the elect may penetrate only after overcoming a number of
perilous obstacles.
In an autobiographical notes written in 1940, George
Orwell said “The modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham,
whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and
without frills.” The ability to write lucid prose is a power not to be
despised, but critics – even ones that enjoy Maugham – warn us readers not to
read too much Maugham in one sitting, lest the plain style start to taste
insipid and flat.
In this novel Maugham unthreateningly uses techniques
associated with the modernists. The story is not told in a linear way: he jumps
around in time and reveals information when it is “convenient.” He’s ironic in
the sardonic modernist manner when he points out that each of the characters
has found happiness in the form they wanted. Maugham also dons the gay apparel
of the unreliable narrator. He places Grey, Isabel, Elliott and their set on
the hedonic
treadmill, but makes it clear he enjoys hanging out with such materialistic
flibbertigibbets and finds Larry’s quest puzzling.
The first person narration is conducted by Maugham
himself, a character in the novel. How metafictional! He refers to his own novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919) as a previous
example of the story of a guy who turns his back on the expectations of the
world to find his own artistic or spiritual path. He admits depending on
imagination to recount conversations in which he did not participate. The
reported conversations are usually persuasive but when they are not, they seem
forced and heavy.
The prose is generally quite readable, making the novel
feel loose in the sense of relaxed, like an extended conversation on a summer evening.
In a way, his clumsy chatty prose disarms us readers. For instance, he
disclaims any expertise in rendering American English and goes on to prove it
by having Larry say, “I was reading Descartes the other day. The ease, the
grace, the lucidity. Gosh!” When Isabel rebukes him for sitting on the
sidelines of life, Larry smiles and says, “You're very severe, honey,” like no man
said to no woman ever.
Maugham also puts us homebody readers at ease by taking us
to the most sophisticated circles of the rich and shiftless and the scuzziest
dives of whores and jolly jack-tars, flattering us that we can be as cosmopolitan
and open to experience as Maugham though we’ve never been farther from Holt,
Michigan than Lansing. He invites us to laugh at the snobbishness of the “old
cissie” Elliott Templeton and his whoring after trashy aristocrats on their
uppers. He invites us unhip readers to feel worldly-wise, as we assess the
claim that popularity and prestige are false promises, being at the mercy of
fickle public opinion and the relentless passing of time.
Born in 1874, Maugham was 70 when this novel was
released. Readers over 50 themselves will admire Maugham for still having the
cognitive kung-fu to focus, write and revise in the long, frustrating,
nightmarish process of producing a novel. His discipline and professionalism
inspire awe. Plus, Maugham’s heart goes out to characters 40 years younger than
him, a compassion that neither young nor old readers would expect in a
codger-author notorious for his icy detachment. Remember the irreverent send-up
of Hardy in Cakes and Ale (1930)?
The last attraction is pitched to that high-minded
segment of lifelong learners in the American market, readers that feel wary of “just
stories” unless they can be instructed in something new. Chapter Six slows the flow
toward the conclusion, so Maugham plays fair by cautioning us that readers “can
very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have
to tell.” Maugham then has Larry give a TED-Talk on sainthood, Vedanta, and
reincarnation.
So, for its readability, flattery of the reader, empathy
for youth, and teaching points, it’s no wonder that this entertainment was a
best-seller during WWII. It has never gone out of print. It’s on Anthony Burgess’ list of 99
great novels since the late 1930s. It’s been made into a movie twice. It’s still frequently
read for reading challenges and book groups. It’s a classic quest novel.
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