The Moon and Sixpence Page 4
Neither is the future mapped out for Philip at the end of the novel an accurate description of Maugham’s own life. Even before the publication of Of Human Bondage in 1915, he had begun an affair with Syrie Barnardo Wellcome, an ambitious and gregarious society beauty who was a far cry from the simple and generous Sally, and they were married in 1917. By then, however, he had met and fallen in love with Gerald Haxton, and together the men began to travel the world, first to Tahiti in 1916, where he gathered material for The Moon and Sixpence, and then to China in the winter of 1919–20. This extensive travel was impelled in part by Maugham’s desire to leave what he had quickly come to realize was an ill-advised marriage and in part by his growing dissatisfaction with London’s cultural and social life. “On the surface,” he later wrote, “my life was varied and exciting; but beneath it was narrow.”
The thematic shift from Of Human Bondage to The Moon and Sixpence is clearly revealed in an explanatory comment Maugham had intended would precede the text of the latter novel but which was never published: “in his childhood [the author] was urged to make merry over the man who, looking for the moon, missed the sixpence at his feet, but having reached years of maturity, he is not so sure that this was so great an absurdity as he was bidden to believe. Let him who will pick up the sixpence, to pursue the moon seems the most amusing diversion.” Philip Carey had abandoned his search for the moon to pick up the sixpence, but Maugham was no longer prepared to do so. For the rest of his life he traveled extensively, seeking out the exotic, the romantic, and the unconventional.
Maugham, however, could never entirely free himself from the London literary/social circles in which he had moved for twenty years. Part of him enjoyed being lionized, and for the remainder of his life no one savored the latest gossip, news of sexual misadventures, infidelities, misadventures, and reputations made and lost, than him. He delighted in an evening at his club, a dinner at the Café Royale, and his suite at the Dorchester Hotel. Even when he began living at Cap Ferrat, he brought the literary/social world to him by inviting authors, artists, university dons, politicians, and socialites to his luxurious villa. An inveterate snob, he could boast of offering his table to the many titled aristocrats and minor royal figures who, dispossessed and down of their luck had sought refuge along the Riviera.
Maugham was a man of many contradictions and internal conflicts, not the least of which was that between his attraction to, and acceptance by, the social world and his desire for adventure, unorthodoxy, and a simple life. By 1918, when he began writing The Moon and Sixpence, he was forty-four, and, though he could admire and envy the boldness and individuality of a Strickland, he could no longer emulate it. The artist’s rebellion and rejection of civilization is therefore filtered through the eyes of a narrator, and the author and reader thus stand apart from Strickland’s quest, awestruck and mystified, perhaps, but not fully engaged in it.
In the end, perhaps Maugham’s portrait of artistic genius through the eyes of a narrator who can observe but not participate is what has given The Moon and Sixpence its lasting appeal. Constrained by the demands of family, community, profession, trapped by the particular conditions of their time and place, and subject to the larger forces of history itself, few readers can ever contemplate following Charles Strickland’s path. They can nonetheless be fascinated by his defiance of such restraints and by his artistic achievement, and through him they can perhaps satisfy, even vicariously, some of their desires to break free from the narrowness of their own lives.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Burt, Forrest D. W. Somerset Maugham. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Calder, Robert. Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham. London: Heinemann, 1989.
Curtis, Anthony. The Pattern of Maugham. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974.
Holden, Philip. Orienting Masculinity, Orienting Nation: W. Somerset Maugham’s Exotic Fiction. London: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Liebman, Sheldon W. “Fiction as Fantasy: The Unreliable Narrator in The Moon and Sixpence.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 38 (1995): 329–43.
Macey, David J. “Fantasy as Necessity: The Role of the Biographer in The Moon and Sixpence.” Studies in the Novel 30 (1997): 61–73.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Somerset Maugham: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2004.
Whitehead, John. Maugham: A Reappraisal. Towota, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1978.
The Moon and Sixpence
I
I confess that when first I made acquaintance with Charles Strickland I never for a moment discerned that there was in him anything out of the ordinary. Yet now few will be found to deny his greatness. I do not speak of that greatness which is achieved by the fortunate politician or the successful soldier; that is a quality which belongs to the place he occupies rather than to the man; and a change of circumstance reduces it to very discreet proportions. The Prime Minister out of office is seen, too often, to have been but a pompous rhetorician, and the General without an army is but the tame hero of a market town. The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic. It may be that you do not like his art, but at all events you can hardly refuse it the tribute of your interest. He disturbs and arrests. The time has passed when he was an object of ridicule, and it is no longer a mark of eccentricity to defend or of perversity to extol him. His faults are accepted as the necessary complement to his merits. It is still possible to discuss his place in art, and the adulation of his admirers is perhaps no less capricious than the disparagement of his detractors; but one thing can never be doubtful, and that is that he had genius. To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults. I suppose Velasquez was a better painter than El Greco, but custom stales one’s admiration for him: the Cretan, sensual and tragic, proffers the mystery of his soul like a standing sacrifice. The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer. The most insignificant of Strickland’s works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them; it is this which has excited so curious an interest in his life and character.
It was not till four years after Strickland’s death that Maurice Huret wrote that article in the Mercure de France which rescued the unknown painter from oblivion and blazed the trail which succeeding writers, with more or less docility, have followed. For a long time no critic has enjoyed in France a more incontestable authority, and it was impossible not to be impressed by the claims he made; they seemed extravagant; but later judgements have confirmed his estimate, and the reputation of Charles Strickland is now firmly established on the lines which he laid down. The rise of this reputation is one of the most romantic incidents in the history of art. But I do not propose to deal with Charles Strickland’s work except in so far as it touches upon his character. I cannot agree with the painters who claim superciliously that the layman can understand nothing of painting, and that he can best show his appreciation of their works by silence and a cheque-book. It is a grotesque misapprehension which sees in art no more than a craft comprehensible perfectly only to the craftsman: art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand. But I will allow that the critic who has not a practical knowledge of technique is seldom able to say anything on the subject of real value, and my ignorance of painting is extreme. Fortunately, there is no need for me to risk the adventure, since my friend, Mr Edward Leggatt, an able writer as well as an admirable painter, has exhaustively discussed Charles Strickland’s work in a little book* which is a charming example of a style, for the most part, less happily cultivated in England than in France.
Maurice Huret in his famous article gave an outline of Charles Strickland’s life which was well calculated to whet the appetites of the inquiring. With his disinterested passion for art, he had a real desire to call the attention of the wise to a talent which was in the highest degree original; but he was too good a journalist to be unaware that the ‘human interest’ would enable him more easily to effect his purpose. And when such as had come in contact with Strickland in the past, writers who had known him in London, painters who had met him in the cafés of Montmartre, discovered to their amazement that where they had seen but an unsuccessful artist, like another authentic genius had rubbed shoulders with them, there began to appear in the magazines of France and America a succession of articles, the reminiscences of one, the appreciation of another, which added to Strickland’s notoriety, and fed without satisfying the curiosity of the public. The subject was grateful, and the industrious Weitbrecht-Rotholz in his imposing monograph* has been able to give a remarkable list of authorities.
The faculty for myth is innate in the human race. It seizes with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief. It is the protest of romance against the commonplace of life. The incidents of the legend become the hero’s surest passport to immortality. The ironic philosopher reflects with a smile that Sir Walter Raleigh is more safely enshrined in the memory of mankind because he set his cloak for the Virgin Queen to walk on than because he carried the English name to undiscovered countries. Charles Strickland lived obscurely. He made enemies rather than friends. It is not strange, then, that those who wrote of him should have eked out their scanty recollections with a lively
fancy, and it is evident that there was enough in the little that was known of him to give opportunity to the romantic scribe; there was much in his life which was strange and terrible, in his character something outrageous, and in his fate not a little that was pathetic. In due course a legend arose of such circumstantiality that the wise historian would hesitate to attack it.
But a wise historian is precisely what the Rev. Robert Strickland is not. He wrote his biography* avowedly to ‘remove certain misconceptions which had gained currency’ in regard to the later part of his father’s life, and which had ‘caused considerable pain to persons still living’. It is obvious that there was much in the commonly received account of Strickland’s life to embarrass a respectable family. I have read this work with a good deal of amusement, and upon this I congratulate myself, since it is colourless and dull. Mr Strickland has drawn the portrait of an excellent husband and father, a man of kindly temper, industrious habits, and moral disposition. The modern clergyman has acquired in his study of the science which I believe is called exegesis an astonishing facility for explaining things away, but the subtlety with which the Rev. Robert Strickland has ‘interpreted’ all the facts in his father’s life which a dutiful son might find it convenient to remember must surely lead him in the fullness of time to the highest dignities of the Church. I see already his muscular calves encased in the gaiters episcopal. It was a hazardous, though maybe a gallant thing to do, since it is probable that the legend commonly received has had no small share in the growth of Strickland’s reputation; for there are many who have been attracted to his art by the detestation in which they held his character or the compassion with which they regarded his death; and the son’s well-meaning efforts threw a singular chill upon the father’s admirers. It is due to no accident that when one of his most important works, The Woman of Samaria,† was sold to Christie’s shortly after the discussion which followed the publication of Mr Strickland’s biography, it fetched £235 less than it had done nine months before, when it was bought by the distinguished collector whose sudden death had brought it once more under the hammer. Perhaps Charles Strickland’s power and originality would scarcely have sufficed to turn the scale if the remarkable mythopoeic faculty of mankind had not brushed aside with impatience a story which disappointed all its craving for the extraordinary. And presently Dr Weitbrecht-Rotholz produced the work which finally set at rest the misgivings of all lovers of art.
Dr Weitbrecht-Rotholz belongs to that school of historians which believes that human nature is not only about as bad as it can be, but a great deal worse; and certainly the reader is safer of entertainment in their hands than in those of the writers who take a malicious pleasure in representing the great figures of romance as patterns of the domestic virtues. For my part, I should be sorry to think that there was nothing between Antony and Cleopatra but an economic situation; and it will require a great deal more evidence than is ever likely to be available, thank God, to persuade me that Tiberius was as blameless a monarch as King George V. Dr Weitbrecht-Rotholz has dealt in such terms with the Rev. Robert Strickland’s innocent biography that it is difficult to avoid feeling a certain sympathy for the unlucky parson. His decent reticence is branded as hypocrisy, his circumlocutions are roundly called lies, and his silence is vilified as treachery. And on the strength of peccadilloes, reprehensible in an author, but excusable in a son, the Anglo-Saxon race is accused of prudishness, humbug, pretentiousness, deceit, cunning, and bad cooking. Personally I think it was rash of Mr Strickland, in refuting the account which had gained belief of a certain ‘unpleasantness’ between his father and mother, to state that Charles Strickland in a letter written from Paris had described her as ‘an excellent woman’, since Dr Weitbrecht-Rotholz was able to print the letter in facsimile, and it appears that the passage referred to ran in fact as follows: God damn my wife. She is an excellent woman. I wish she was in hell. It is not thus that the Church in its great days dealt with evidence that was unwelcome.
Dr Weitbrecht-Rotholz was an enthusiastic admirer of Charles Strickland, and there was no danger that he would whitewash him. He had an unerring eye for the despicable motive in actions that had all the appearance of innocence. He was a psycho-pathologist as well as a student of art, and the subconscious had few secrets from him. No mystic ever saw deeper meaning in common things. The mystic sees the ineffable and the psycho-pathologist the unspeakable. There is a singular fascination in watching the eagerness with which the learned author ferrets out every circumstance which may throw discredit on his hero. His heart warms to him when he can bring forward some example of cruelty or meanness, and he exults like an inquisitor at the auto da fé of an heretic when with some forgotten story he can confound the filial piety of the Rev. Robert Strickland. His industry has been amazing. Nothing has been too small to escape him, and you may be sure that if Charles Strickland left a laundry bill unpaid it will be given you in extenso, and if he forbore to return a borrowed half-crown no detail of the transaction will be omitted.
II
When so much has been written about Charles Strickland, it may seem unnecessary that I should write more. A painter’s monument is his work. It is true I knew him more intimately than most: I met him first before ever he became a painter, and I saw him not infrequently during the difficult years he spent in Paris; but I do not suppose I should ever have set down my recollections if the hazards of the war had not taken me to Tahiti. There, as is notorious, he spent the last years of his life; and there I came across persons who were familiar with him. I find myself in a position to throw light on just that part of his tragic career which has remained most obscure. If they who believe in Strickland’s greatness are right, the personal narratives of such as knew him in the flesh can hardly be superfluous. What would we not give for the reminiscences of someone who had been as intimately acquainted with El Greco as I was with Strickland?
But I seek refuge in no such excuses. I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul’s good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed. But there is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a more severe mortification. I have never failed to read the Literary Supplement of The Times. It is a salutary discipline to consider the vast number of books that are written, the fair hopes with which their authors see them published, and the fate which awaits them. What chance is there that any book will make its way among that multitude? And the successful books are but the successes of a season. Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experiences he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours’ relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey. And if I may judge from the reviews, many of these books are well and carefully written; much thought has gone to their composition; to some even has been given the anxious labour of a lifetime. The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thoughts; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.
Now the war has come, bringing with it a new attitude. Youth has turned to gods we of an earlier day knew not, and it is possible to see already the direction in which those who come after us will move. The younger generation, conscious of strength and tumultuous, have done with knocking at the door; they have burst in and seated themselves in our seats. The air is noisy with their shouts. Of their elders some, by imitating the antics of youth, strive to persuade themselves that their day is not yet over; they shout with the lustiest, but the war-cry sounds hollow in their mouth; they are like poor wantons attempting with pencil, paint, and powder, with shrill gaiety, to recover the illusion of their spring. The wiser go their way with a decent grace. In their chastened smile is an indulgent mockery. They remember that they too trod down a sated generation, with just such clamour and with just such scorn, and they foresee that these brave torchbearers will presently yield their place also. There is no last word. The new evangel was old when Nineveh reared her greatness to the sky. These gallant words which seem so novel to those that speak them were said in accents scarcely changed a hundred times before. The pendulum swings backwards and forwards. The circle is ever travelled anew.