Magic Maugham

Back to Somerset Maugham for good storytelling, well defined boundaries, relief from anything remotely post-modern, and just plain good writing. I’ve read most of his famous novels, so I picked up ‘The Narrow Corner’, published first in 1932.  Never heard of it.

It’s quite unlike anything else by him that I’ve read.  Yes, it’s a bit of a seafaring yarn; the locale is exotic and the characters are odd and idiosyncratic.  But the action is slow, and the main character is fascinating in a mostly passive way.  What he doesn’t do is more interesting than what he actually does. Another important character is quite funny and quaint.  But what distinguishes the book for me is its consistent focus on ideas, on approaches to life and the consequences thereof.  It’s almost Maugham’s ‘Magic Mountain’, though it’s not nearly as long or pedantic.  Take these passages, for example:

“Do you really want to know? I believe in nothing but myself and my experience. The world consists of me and my thoughts and my feelings; and everything else is mere fancy. Life is a dream in which I create the objects that come before me. Everything knowable, every object of experience, is an idea in my mind, and without my mind it does not exist. There is no possibility and no necessity to postulate anything outside myself. Dream and reality are one. Life is a connected and consistent dream, and when I cease to dream, the world, with its beauty, its pain and sorrow, its unimaginable variety, will cease to be.”

Another character responds, “You’re content to wallow in the gutter.”

“I get a certain amount of fun watching the antics of the other creatures that dwell there.”

And later, “I have acquired resignation by the help of an unfailing sense of the ridiculous.”

And the very last sentence of the novel:

 “He sighed a little, for whatever it was, if the richest dreams the imagination offered came true, in the end it remained nothing but illusion.”

Those are not exactly traditional British (or even Western) views.  The novel takes place in the South Seas where Western and Eastern cultures collide and mix in interesting ways.  The ideas are downright subversive for the time.  It’s interesting to compare this work to Hesse’s ‘Siddhartha’. Both books attempt to present non-Western approaches to life in the guise of a Western novel.  It’s not an easy thing to bring off, and as a novel I’m not sure this one is entirely successful.  The plot has some dull stretches, and at times Maugham uncomfortably stretches our credulity.  Characters sometimes act in ways that don’t seem quite real or believable.  But they do so to make a point.  Indeed a few minor characters seem to exist only to represent opposing viewpoints in the larger debate about how to live life.

All this may not make the most compelling novel, but it does raise lots of interesting questions.  Is it really possible to be resigned to the circumstances and happenings that life presents, or is that a luxury reserved for those that can afford it? Does a strong moral imperative inevitably lead to disappointment and heartbreak? Are strong feelings necessarily self-defeating?  Is it easier to be resigned from the outset to whatever is and never take up the fight to make a difference?  What if everyone took that approach?  How would society function?  What does that mean about capitalism?  What does it mean for religion? Does it help anyone or anything to truly attempt to be good? To love strongly and fully?

[As we approach commencement season, it strikes me that these are not the ideas we’ll hear in those commencement speeches.  No encouragement here for those graduates. There can be no real success, so why even try?]

Well, there is some fine writing.  My favorite passage is one in which the main character (Dr. Saunders) sees a glimmer of something deep in another character, a young man who so far had seemed uninteresting:

“Perhaps it was his good looks that deceived him, perhaps it was due to the companionship of Eric Christessen, but at that moment he felt that there was in the lad a strain of something he had never suspected. Perhaps there was there the dim groping beginning of a soul. The thought faintly amused Dr. Saunders. It gave him just that little shock of surprise that one feels when what looked like a twig on a branch suddenly opens wings and flies away.”

Yes, “faintly amused’.  That about sums up Maugham’s approach here.  Sit back, relax, watch carefully, and accept what happens.  Perhaps the best one can hope for is to be ‘faintly amused’ or perhaps a ‘little shock of surprise’. Getting ruffled and agitated or having strong feelings of any kind never seem to get anyone anywhere here. Interesting to remember that writers like Faulkner, Mann, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf were gaining critical acclaim at this time. Though Maugham’s voice is by comparison traditional, at least some of the ideas are not.