The Hero By William Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) has fallen out of fashion today and that’s a great shame: there are few writers of such clarity of prose and consistency of vision who are also so eminently enjoyable to read.  He also wrote of the people he knew; people who, for today’s world, are increasingly irrelevant.  His is a vanished world of the English living abroad in a developing world, or of the complacent English at home wracked by an intruding outside world. 

Maugham lived a life as exciting and varied as any of that of his heroes.  He was an inveterate traveler and addicted to romance; his stories usually have a kernel of truth, often something he heard while aboard ship, over a game of bridge, or in some distant outpost of the Empire.  Many of his short stories are little better than detailed anecdotes, but the majority of his novels have a distinct power, commanding a clear-eyed (and often cynical) view of humanity and a sense of narrative sweep.  He is a writer to be savored, read and re-read.

It was with a great deal of anticipation that I recently approached The Hero, his novel from 1901.  It is available for free at the invaluable www.ManyBooks.net, and comes highly recommended.

The finished book was a huge disappointment both critically and commercially for Maugham.  It did not enjoy a second printing in the UK, and did not receive US publication until decades later.  It is a stunning indictment of small time mores and morals, and the small-mindedness that seems to be second nature with habitual do-gooders.  Readers were unhappy with Maugham’s social satire and blistering criticism, and reacted accordingly.  (Oddly enough, The Hero was the first book in which Maugham used the Moorish symbol on the cover that would become associated with him for most of the 20^th Century – used, ironically, for luck.  The writer would have to wait for better luck next time.)

The story is a tale of the Boer War and its aftermath.  Young Jamie Parsons received the Victoria Cross for bravery in the Transvaal for his failed attempt to save the life of Reginald Larcher.  Now a celebrated war hero, he returns home to the small town of Little Primpton, Kent.  He is met with a parade and speeches, as well as by his father and mother, the devout Colonel Richmond and Frances Parsons.  Jamie’s bravery is a particular boon to the Colonel – a deeply Christian man, the Colonel was responsible for the loss of his regiment after he showed mercy to the enemy, and was repaid with a surprise attack.

Also waiting at Little Primpton is Mary Clibborn, his fiancée.  She is an extremely tedious person – constantly doing ‘good’ with little or no regard for the recipients of her largesse, or any understanding of the real world outside of the homilies of provincial religious primers.

The worst part of it all is that Jamie has come back to Little Primpton a changed man.  After his experiences in the wider world – including war, death and a flirtation with a brother-officer’s wife – Jamie no longer fits into the way of life nor the mindset of this little backwater.  When Jamie decides to end his engagement to Mary, the town – led mostly by the parson and his wife – exact revenge.

One of the chief joys of The Hero is watching Maugham deflate the small-town sanctimony of many of the characters.  Here his ruthless in his summation of his world.  Here he is on the state of England at the time (and he could have been writing about America today):

James had been away from England for five years; and in that time a curious change, long silently proceeding, had made itself openly felt—becoming manifest, like an insidious disease, only when every limb and every organ were infected. A new spirit had been in action, eating into the foundations of the national character; it worked through the masses of the great cities, unnerved by the three poisons of drink, the Salvation Army, and popular journalism. A mighty force of hysteria and sensationalism was created, seething, ready to burst its bonds ... The canker spread through the country-side; the boundaries of class and class are now so vague that quickly the whole population was affected; the current literature of the day flourished upon it; the people of England, neurotic from the stress of the last sixty years, became unstable as water. And with the petty reverses of the beginning of the war, the last barriers of shame were broken down; their arrogance was dissipated, and suddenly the English became timorous as a conquered nation, deprecating, apologetic; like frightened women, they ran to and fro, wringing their hands. Reserve, restraint, self-possession, were swept away ... And now we are frankly emotional; reeds tottering in the wind, our boast is that we are not even reeds that think; we cry out for idols. Who is there that will set up a golden ass that we may fall down and worship? We glory in our shame, in our swelling hearts, in our eyes heavy with tears. We want sympathy at all costs; we run about showing our bleeding vitals, asking one another whether they are not indeed a horrible sight. Englishmen now are proud of being womanish, and nothing is more manly than to weep. To be a man of feeling is better than to be a gentleman—it is certainly much easier. The halt of mind, the maim, the blind of wit, have come by their own; and the poor in spirit have inherited the earth.

James had left England when this emotional state was contemptible. Found chiefly in the dregs of the populace, it was ascribed to ignorance and to the abuse of stimulants. When he returned, it had the public conscience behind it. He could not understand the change. The persons he had known sober, equal-minded, and restrained, now seemed violently hysterical. James still shuddered, remembering the curate's allusions to his engagement; and he wondered that Mary, far from thinking them impertinent, had been vastly gratified. She seemed to take pleasure in publicly advertising her connection, in giving her private affairs to the inspection of all and sundry. The whole ceremony had been revolting; he loathed the adulation and the fulsome sentiment. His own emotions seemed vulgar now that he had been forced to display them to the gaping crowd.

The Hero is highly recommended, though I fear that the people who should read it (small town America) will not.  Its sour overview of empty-headed churchmen and interfering blue-noses is as needed today as it was in 1901 … and would probably be just as popular.

God is Not Great and the Religion of Art

Just as politics fall outside the purview of this blog, so do questions of religion.  Your correspondent has definite opinions in the matter, and, ultimately, all questions of religion fall into the realm of opinion.  Mine may not be particularly more or less relevant than yours, and are quite beside the point in the bargain.

However, I should confess (such an apropos locution when discussing religion) that Art has always provided the comfort and solace for me usually supplied by monotheistic faith.  My “religious conversion” occurred during a reading of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in my early boyhood. 

In the heavily scented and mysterious 11^th Chapter, Wilde details the various forms taken by Dorian’s aestheticism.  While much of it was heavily ornamented puffery, I was struck by this passage:  “But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.”

That phrase – “a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic” – has haunted me for decades.  I have been trying to define my spirituality along the same lines ever since.

These thoughts came back to me as I read God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens.  It would be a difficult thing indeed to find two more disparate individuals that Wilde and Hitchens.  Wilde was a consummate artist while still being one of the great comedians of the language.  He never drew his sword to draw blood, but, more as a bodkin with which to point for ironic effect.  Hitchens, on the other hand, is a very public intellectual who delights in the fight.  In fact, I believe that Hitchens produces his best work when he is angriest, and longs to bloody his boxing gloves before hanging them up.

Wilde laughs; Hitchens lunges.  Both are remarkable minds.

Imagine, then, my surprise, when I saw the lesson of Wilde in God is Not Great.  In this masterful refutation of religious thinking, dogma and tradition, Hitchens cheerfully enumerates the spiritual consolations he finds more satisfying than religion: “It does not matter to me whether Homer was one person or many, or whether Shakespeare was a secret Catholic or a closet agnostic.  I should not feel my own world destroyed if the greatest writer about love and tragedy and comedy and morals was finally revealed to have been the Earl of Oxford all along, though I must add that sole authorship is important to me and I would be saddened and diminished to learn that Bacon had been the man.  Shakespeare has much more moral salience than the Talmud or the Koran or any account of the fearful squabbles of Iron Age tribes.  But there is a great deal to be learned and appreciated from the scrutiny of religion, and one often finds oneself standing atop the shoulders of distinguished writers and thinkers who were certainly one’s intellectual and sometimes even one’s moral superiors.  Many of them, in their own time, had ripped away the disguise of idolatry and paganism, and even risked martyrdom for the sake of disputes with their own coreligionists.  However, a moment in history has now arrived when even a pygmy such as myself can claim to know more – through no merit of his own – and to see that the final ripping of the whole disguise is overdue.  Between them, the sciences of textual criticism, archaeology, physics, and molecular biology have shown religious myths to be false and man-made and have also succeeded in evolving better and more enlightened explanations.  The loss of faith can be compensated by the newer and finer wonders that we have before us, as well as by immersion in the near-miraculous works of Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Tolstoy and Proust, all of which was also “man-made” (though one sometimes wonders, as in the case of Mozart).  I can say this as one whose own secular faith has been shaken and discarded, not without pain.”

This is fine stuff.  Finer still is his dismissal of religious texts in favor of Art: “We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.  Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.”

On other hands, these assertions could become arch, or, worse, strident.  Into these pits Hitchens never falls.  Wilde, also in Dorian Gray, wrote: “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.  Books are well written or badly written.  That is all.”

God is Not Great is very well written, indeed.  Hitchens is a lucid stylist with a clear and reasoned line of argument.  There are moments where his pleas for a New Age of Enlightenment inspire the reader to be more attuned to human achievement and more skeptical of anti-human dogma.  This is an important book.