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[1] 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.
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 [2].
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's 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.
Nice. Maugham's genial-looking prose style is more artful than he lets on. It is inviting, isn't it? And yet not unsubtle. He overlaps the high modernists in English, though that's partly because he lives so long, without being one of them. But as you note there are least nods to more adventurous fiction, though maybe more pomo than just mo?
ReplyDeleteInteresting that about Orwell, though perhaps not surprising.
I'd forgotten it was on Burgess' list. I added that tag to my review.