The Spy Who Loved Me, by Ian Fleming (1962)

It is very hard for people who have never read Ian Fleming (1908-1964) before to dip into the James Bond novels.  And that is mainly because the movies have ruined our perception of Fleming and his world, perhaps for all time.

This is not to say that all Bond-films are bad.  Some of them – Goldfinger (1964), Octopussy (1983) and a few other come to mind – are delightful fun; and others – most significantly From Russia, With Love (1963) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) – are almost real movies, films that pack an emotional and intellectual heft.  But from the best to the worst, there is very little of Fleming’s Bond in these films, and the rewards of reading Fleming have not yet been replicated in other mediums.

Despite the fact that Fleming himself sometimes denigrated his own work, it is clear that he was a novelist with ambitions within, and beyond, the framework in which he wrote.  He was initially influenced by the ‘hardboiled’ school of detective fiction, and professed a great love of Raymond Chandler (1888-1959).  But his earliest books, Casino Royale (1953) and Live and Let Die (1954), are little better than simple thrillers.  It was only with his third book, Moonraker (1955) that the unique fictive world he sought to create started to crystalize. 

Pop fiction can be written with various degrees of artistry, and such books as From Russia, With Love (1957), Dr. No (1958), and You Only Live Twice (1964) are written with a great deal of dash and more than a touch of something akin to a pulpy poetry.  When Fleming finally found that unique “voice” of the Bond thrillers, he was writing with a stylish purity that cannot be found in mere potboilers. 

Like the most vivid of thriller writers (Sax Rohmer comes to mind, ditto John Buchan and very early Leslie Chateris), Fleming wrote with complete conviction: once he finally found the voice of Bond and his world, he wrote with a complete and total emotional investment.  It is this authorial honesty that makes so many of the books work so wonderfully well.

But he was also acutely aware that the Bond novels were simply entertainments.  Expertly crafted and intriguing, but still simply entertainments.

And so, he tried, within the framework he had created, to transcend the disposability that was hardwired into character and the framework of the novels.  These experiments resulted in the terrific short story collection For Your Eyes Only (1960), and the only first-person James Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me (1962).

For Your Eyes Only consists of five short stories, and most of them are as “Un-Bondian” as one can imagine.  More literary, more anecdotal, more set in a recognizable reality, Fleming slips into Somerset Maugham territory with tight and psychologically sound short stories that humanize Bond.  I find For Your Eyes Only to be a terrific book with which to hook readers on Fleming, and it is highly recommended.

However, Fleming comes his very closest to a real, moving and genre-busting novel with The Spy Who Loved Me.  Initially dismissed by the critics (so much so that Fleming put the kibosh on paperback reprints in his lifetime) and usually shrugged off by hardcore Bond fans (more on that later), The Spy Who Loved Me is actually Fleming at his best: psychosocially sound, moving and profoundly real.

Spy is written in the first person by a young French-Canadian woman, Vivienne Michel.  She tells of her leaving her provincial hometown and the nuns that taught her, and, of her first love affair with a boy named Derek.  Fleming writes of a terrifying (and searing) moment when Vivienne nearly loses her virginity in a dirty cinema, and how Derek casts her aside once he uses her.  

Vivienne then steals herself against emotional involvement until later when she and her German boss, Kurt, become lovers.  Though cold and calculating, their relationship is satisfactory until Vivienne finds herself pregnant.  Horrified at the notion of marrying a non-German, Kurt fires her and gives her a plane ticket and an abortion as severance.

Finally promising herself that she is through with men, Vivienne then takes to her handy Vespa, and starts travelling down through Canada and into the United States.   It is in these passages that some of Fleming’s most pungent writing can be found: his disdain for tourist culture and kitschy roadside attractions drips from the page like rank battery acid.

Vivienne finds work in a soon-to-close for the season motel near Lake George.  On her last night there, alone and waiting for the owners to come next morning, Vivienne is assaulted and detained by two small-time punks, Sluggsy and Horror.  Rape and murder seem to be her ultimate fate … until the doorbell rings.

It’s Bond, James Bond, stranded with a flat tire.  At first, Vivienne thinks he is another punk:  At first glance I inwardly groaned—God it’s another of them!  He stood there so quiet and controlled and somehow with the same quality of deadliness as the others.  And he wore that uniform that the films make one associate with gangsters—a dark-blue belted raincoat and a soft black hat pulled rather far down.  He was good-looking in a dark, rather cruel way, and a scar showed whitely down his left cheek.  I quickly put my hand up to hide my nakedness.  Then he smiled and suddenly I thought I might be all right.

It doesn’t take a famous, world-class secret agent much time to deduce that there are problems in this little, out-of-the-way motel.  Before too many pages fly by (and they do fly by), Bond has saved Vivienne from the burning motel, eliminated the punks, and bedded our heroine.  More than that, he smooths matters over with the police, and ensures that Vivienne is on the road safe-and-sound in her Vespa as if nothing ever happened.  James Bond, professional killer and troubleshooter, restores her faith in male-kind.

Fleming plays a very canny (and very tricky) game here: Bond is, no matter how much one wants to parse his motives and methods, a hero.  But he is also a denizen of a darker and more dangerous world; a world that has no place for normal people with normal problems like Vivienne Michel.  But it is this compromised figure who saves her life and restores her faith in people.  Fleming is fully aware of the irony, and we, who know so much of Bond from previous books, know as well.

However, it is this very act of authorial savvy that prevents Fleming from elevating his tale into something closer to a real literary achievement, rather than merely executing a world-class entertainment.  Because the very presence of James Bond in the third act cheapens everything that comes before it.

My paperback edition of Spy runs to 180 pages, and James Bond does not enter until page 108.  What has been a straight novel now becomes a James Bond adventure.  Fleming had the confidence to stretch and try something new, but not enough to do it without the crutch of his most famous creation.  Could he have written a novel where Bond makes a late-page entrance and does not play the role of hero and savior?  Yes, we are convinced of it.  But, at the last minute, his nerve failed him and he went for something more tried-and-true. 

The Spy Who Loved Me is a terrific book that is let down by its ending, and a stellar James Bond novel that ultimately fails once James Bond comes into it.  As such, it hovers in a weird twilight within the Fleming corpus: an almost straight novel of real power and insight that is just a fair James Bond adventure. 

Ian Fleming was only 56 at the time of his death, and he was just entering the height of his powers.  What kind of novels would we have gotten from him had he another 10 or 20 years of life?  Would he have continued to grow and evolve as a novelist?  Would he have ultimately abandoned James Bond and written more literary novels?

We’ll never know.  But we do know that in the realm of pop fiction, Fleming was in a class by himself.

Readers interested in Bond are referred to these wonderful sites:  James Bond Memes at: https://jamesbondmemes.blogspot.com/ and Artistic License Renewed at: https://literary007.com/.

On a Chinese Screen, by William Somerset Maugham (1922)

We have made little secret here at The Jade Sphinx of our love for writer William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965).  Maugham was a great literary artist and a rare one – often his books are related in first-person narration, but the point-of-view is seldom intrusive or misleading.  Maugham had the gift of being everywhere and nowhere; equally at home in a native hut in Burma as at a London society party.  Having earned a medical degree but never practicing medicine, Maugham cast a cold, clinical eye on human behavior, and mercilessly robbed us of our pretentions and affectations.  His is a voice that is missed.

Maugham’s biography makes that of overly macho writers like Hemmingway pale by comparison: world traveler, espionage agent, playwright, art collector, literary stylist.  Maugham travelled long enough and far enough to make Indiana Jones envious, and he used his wide experience as the basis of several of his most successful novels, including The Razor’s Edge (1944) and The Moon and Sixpence (1919).  For those who long for a world that is still exotic, or yearn for places before they were spoiled by fast-food chains and American consumer culture, a diet of Maugham is just what the doctor ordered.

In the winter of 1919, Maugham travelled 1,500 miles up the Yangtze River.  While on the road, Maugham noted down acute and finely crafted sketches of those he met on countless scraps of paper, gathering them together for publication in 1922 under the title On a Chinese Screen.  These scraps include views of Western missionaries, army officers and company managers who are culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilization.  With his typical precision, Maugham sheds light on the most vulnerable parts of their lives.

On a Chinese Screen is, in many ways, the perfect summer book.  There is no through narrative, and most of the ‘chapters’ run no more than a few paragraphs.  It is the perfect book for dipping or gobbling up – the vignettes that Maugham parades before us are mesmerizing.  Reading more like the rough notes of never-realized novels or short stories, the scraps in On a Chinese Screen will resonate in your memory much longer than more sustained and fully-crafted narratives.

Here, for example, is Maugham (celebrated playwright!) talking with a Chinese professor who has studied English theater:  "Does it require no more than that to write a play?" he inquired with a shade of dismay in his tone.

"You want a certain knack," I allowed, "but no more than to play billiards."

"They lecture on the technique of the drama in all the important universities of America," said he.

"The Americans are an extremely practical people," I answered. "I believe that Harvard is instituting a chair to instruct grandmothers how to suck eggs."

"I do not think I quite understand you."

"If you can't write a play no one can teach you and if you can it's as easy as falling off a log."

Here his face expressed a lively perplexity, but I think only because he could not make up his mind whether this operation came within the province of the professor of physics or within that of the professor of applied mechanics.

"But if it is so easy to write a play why do dramatists take so long about it?"

"They didn't, you know. Lope de la Vega and Shakespeare and a hundred others wrote copiously and with ease. Some modern playwrights have been perfectly illiterate men and have found it an almost insuperable difficulty to put two sentences together. A celebrated English dramatist once showed me a manuscript and I saw that he had written the question: will you have sugar in your tea, five times before he could put it in this form. A novelist would starve if he could not on the whole say what he wanted to without any beating about the bush."

"You would not call Ibsen an illiterate man and yet it is well known that he took two years to write a play."

"It is obvious that Ibsen found a prodigious difficulty in thinking of a plot. He racked his brain furiously, month after month, and at last in despair used the very same that he had used before."

"What do you mean?" the professor cried, his voice rising to a shrill scream. "I do not understand you at all."

"Have you not noticed that Ibsen uses the same plot over and over again? A number of people are living in a closed and stuffy room, then some one comes (from the mountains or from over the sea) and flings the window open; everyone gets a cold in the head and the curtain falls."

Or, better yet, here is Maugham, on a Chinese junk, thinking about the nature of adventure and romance.  This passage, perhaps more than ever, parses closest to the center of the Maugham persona, and provides a greater understanding of the sustained sense of living he sought abroad:  Then suddenly I had a feeling that here, facing me, touching me almost, was the romance I sought. It was a feeling like no other, just as specific as the thrill of art; but I could not for the life of me tell what it was that had given me just then that rare emotion.

In the course of my life I have been often in situations which, had I read of them, would have seemed to me sufficiently romantic; but it is only in retrospect, comparing them with my ideas of what was romantic, that I have seen them as at all out of the ordinary. It is only by an effort of the imagination, making myself as it were a spectator of myself acting a part, that I have caught anything of the precious quality in circumstances which in others would have seemed to me instinct with its fine flower. When I have danced with an actress whose fascination and whose genius made her the idol of my country, or wandered through the halls of some great house in which was gathered all that was distinguished by lineage or intellect that London could show, I have only recognized afterwards that here perhaps, though in somewhat Ouidaesque a fashion, was romance.

In battle, when, myself in no great danger, I was able to watch events with a thrill of interest, I had not the phlegm to assume the part of a spectator. I have sailed through the night, under the full moon, to a coral island in the Pacific, and then the beauty and the wonder of the scene gave me a conscious happiness, but only later the exhilarating sense that romance and I had touched fingers. I heard the flutter of its wings when once, in the bedroom of a hotel in New York, I sat round a table with half a dozen others and made plans to restore an ancient kingdom whose wrongs have for a century inspired the poet and the patriot ; but my chief feeling was a surprised amusement that through the hazards of war I found myself engaged in business so foreign to my bent. The authentic thrill of romance has seized me under circumstances which one would have thought far less romantic, and I remember that I knew it first one evening when I was playing cards in a cottage on the coast of Brittany. In the next room an old fisherman lay dying and the women of the house said that he would go out with the tide. Without a storm was raging and it seemed fit for the last moments of that aged warrior of the seas that his going should be accompanied by the wild cries of the wind as it hurled itself against the shuttered windows. The waves thundered upon the tortured rocks. I felt a sudden exultation, for I knew that here was romance.

And now the same exultation seized me, and once more romance, like a bodily presence, was before me. But it had come so unexpectedly that I was intrigued. I could not tell whether it had crept in among the shadows that the lamp threw on the bamboo matting or whether it was wafted down the river that I saw through the opening of my cabin. Curious to know what were the elements that made up the ineffable delight of the moment I went out to the stern of the boat. Alongside were moored half a dozen junks, going up river, for their masts were erect; and everything was silent in them. Their crews were long since asleep. The night was not dark, for though it was cloudy the moon was full, but the river in that veiled light was ghostly. A vague mist blurred the trees on the further bank. It was an enchanting sight, but there was in it nothing unaccustomed and what I sought was not there. I turned away. But when I returned to my bamboo shelter the magic which had given it so extraordinary a character was gone. Alas, I was like a man who should tear a butterfly to pieces in order to discover in what its beauty lay. And yet, as Moses descending from Mount Sinai wore on his face a brightness from his converse with the God of Israel, my little cabin, my dish of charcoal, my lamp, even my camp bed, had still about them something of the thrill which for a moment was mine. I could not see them any more quite indifferently, because for a moment I had seen them magically.

On a Chinese Screen is available for free download at the invaluable www.manybooks.net.  This is the perfect book with which to beguile the closing days of summer.

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.

The Moon and Sixpence

Herbert Marshall and George Sanders

in The Moon and Sixpence

After agonizing over Michelangelo’s ecstasy, let’s take a look at one film about art that gets it right.

In 1942, director Albert Lewin (1894-1968) made a film version of William Somerset Maugham’s 1919 masterpiece, The Moon and Sixpence.  An art collector and aesthete, Maugham was fascinated by both art history and the then-contemporary art world.  He had long wanted to write about the painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), but the novelist held sway over the historian, and Maugham wrote a highly fictionalize version.  In Maugham’s novel the painter, called Charles Strickland instead of Gauguin, is a middle-aged English stockbroker who leaves his wife and goes to Paris to become a painter.  He knows nothing of painters or painting, but something inside of him demands an artistic outlet.

After starving in a garret and learning his craft, he is befriended by a Dutch painter, Dirk Stroeve, who is convinced Strickland is a genius.  Stroeve nurses Strickland out of a long and dangerous illness, and is repaid for his kindness when his wife wants to run away with Strickland.  When he later jilts Mrs. Stroeve, she kills herself, another victim of Strickland’s artistic obsession.

Strickland eventually moves to Tahiti, where he lives with a native woman for many years before succumbing to leprosy.  He has painted the walls of his simple home with countless symbolic images, finding his artistic voice through an appreciation of the culture and customs of the primitive people he befriended.  His native wife, respecting his last wish, burns the house to the ground.

Though unnamed, the narrator is Maugham himself, and he becomes involved in the Stickland household through his friendship with the first Mrs. Strickland.  He also meets with Strickland in Paris, and later tracks down the story of Strickland’s fate in Tahiti while traveling the world himself.  

The genius of Maugham’s structure is that The Moon and Sixpence is really about two artists, Strickland and the narrator.  Both are creators and each has an individual aesthetic vision.  The major difference is that the narrator is passive – he watches life unfold around him and draws his art from it.  He may sometimes take a part in an event, but often from behind a mask, or a remove of indifference.  Strickland, on the other hand, is the protagonist of his own life – affecting lives around him for good and evil through a rapacious self-involvement.  Though the tale never becomes a confrontation between the two artists – either of talents or of temperament – the disparity between the two of them is instructive.

It would be impossible to think of a more appropriate writer and director for the film version than Albert Lewin, who was head MGM’s script development department under the legendary Irving Thalberg.  Moon is Lewin’s first film as a director; he would only direct five more.  He wrote all of them, producing several himself.  As a filmmaker, Lewin was also an aesthete – his films are all remarkably literary and subtle, filled with delicate grace notes and a sense of refinement. 

Moon and Sixpence the film remains very faithful to its source material, and is further bolstered by two remarkable performances.  Herbert Marshall (1890-1966) here named Geoffrey Wolfe, the Maugham stand-in, is superb.  Marshall started his career as a suave leading man, and graduated into playing benign uncles, sympathetic older men and writers.  (He would play Maugham again in The Razor’s Edge in 1946.)  Marshall had a gentle affect mixed with a sense of refined distance – a wonderful choice for Maugham/Wolfe.  It is obvious that anyone would confide in him, but his essential aloofness would keep him the perpetual voyeur. 

Strickland is played by the magnificent George Sanders (1906-1972), in what would be one of his first starring roles in a big-budget A film. Sanders would become Lewin’s secret weapon, starring in three of his six films (the others being The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami in 1945 and 1947, respectively).  Sanders is one of the most fascinating leading men from Hollywood’s Golden Era: he was not classically handsome, nor athletic, nor even particularly likeable.  However, he had a remarkable voice, by turns honeyed and sardonic.  Cynicism and sardonic irony often were his cinematic calling cards, and he spent many years as Hollywood’s favorite cad.  Strickland is something of a change for Sanders – there is a brutal, overbearing quality to the part, which Sanders, with his large physicality, captures wonderfully, but it provides little opportunity for his signature brand of silken villainy.  He would kill himself in Barcelona, Spain, in his 65^th year.  His suicide note said that he was bored.

Steven Gerey (1904-1973) is quite marvelous as the mousey painter Stroeve, and Albert Bassermann (1867-1952), immortal thanks to his work with Hichcock and his role in The Red Shoes (1948), provides strong support as the doctor who treats Stickland at the end of his life.

The Moon and Sixpence is a difficult film for cineastes.  It is readily available on DVD, but the end sequence, where the camera lingers lovingly on the wall paintings of Strickland’s jungle home, were shot in Technicolor, and most prints are in murky, washed-out black and white.  However, George Eastman House struck a restored print complete with the Technicolor sequences which later aired on the indispensable Turner Classic Movies.

The Moon and Sixpence is one of the essential movies about artists – a subject that we’ll address again in the future.  If you ever have the opportunity, by all means catch it – even if it means seeking out the inferior DVD print.

So why does the film version of The Moon and Sixpence “get it right?”  Because the search for art is always the search for something transcendent, and more beautiful within us.  Often this search leaves devastation and ruin in its wake, as is the case with Strickland, or to an emotional and social detachment, as it does with Wolfe.  No quest is without its price, and The Moon and Sixpence shows that sometimes the coin comes very dear.

The title?  Maugham had written both that if you look at the ground for a sixpence, you miss the moon, and that if you looked only at the moon, you missed the sixpence at your feet.  As with much art – your personal point of view will drive your interpretation.

William Somerset Maugham and Of Human Bondage

William Somersert Maugham

Many critics consider Of Human Bondage (1915) to be the great masterpiece of William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965).  I haven’t read the book since my earliest youth, and a longing for Maugham (or, perhaps, my youth) led me to reread the novel.

Bondage is the story of Philip Carey, born with a clubfoot and a deeply sensitive nature.  After the death of his mother, Philip is sent to live with his cold and distant uncle, the Vicar of Blackstable, where he is largely unloved or ignored.  Philip soon goes to school, where his clubfoot is the source of some ridicule, but young Carey does well and seems destined for Oxford.  Instead, yielding to impulse, Philip moves to Heidelberg to study on his own.

Returning to England, he enters into an unsatisfying romance with an older woman before moving to London as a chartered accountant.  Unhappy in an office, Philip then goes to Paris to study painting.  He lives a wonderful Bohemian life until a fellow failed art-student, Miss Price, commits suicide.  Though he has had a great deal of pleasure in Paris, Philip realizes he’ll never be a ‘great’ artist, and returns to England.

It’s in London that Philip finds his true calling, medicine.  He works as a medical student while forming an unhealthy, obsessive passion for a slatternly waitress, Mildred.  Despite his adoration, Mildred treats Philip with disdain, exploiting, insulting and humiliating him.  When Mildred leaves town with a friend of Philip's (who pays for their trip!), our protagonist runs out of money and takes a low-paying position as a shop clerk.

Once his uncle dies, Philip receives a small inheritance.  Mildred comes back into the picture, now with child, and Philip pays for the pre-and-post natal care.  Mildred has become a prostitute and, to spare her that indignity, Philip invites her to live with him in exchange for house-keeping duties.  Once it is apparent that Philip has overcome his obsession for her, Mildred flies into a rage and destroys all of his belongings, trashing the apartment.  She leaves him … perhaps forever.

As Philip finishes his residency, he slowly falls in love with a young country girl, the daughter of a friend.  He passes Mildred in the street, now secure in his freedom from her, and later proposes to the young woman prior to moving off to become a country doctor in a small seaside town.

Of Human Bondage is a remarkable book that plays to all of Maugham’s strengths and weaknesses.  Maugham is perhaps the most interesting, insightful and polished short story writer of the Twentieth Century, looking at raw human behavior with honesty and compassion.  His short stories “Rain,” “The Letter,” and “The Outstation” are all masterpieces of the form.  He also had a special gift for observing the Englishman Abroad, and his stories of Southeast Asia reflect his own extensive travels throughout the Empire.  His ‘travel books,’ for want of a better phrase, are important aesthetic and historical documents, chronicling a time when the world was small and many of its peoples simple. 

His novels, however, are often a mixed bag.  They suffer from an episodic quality that often feels like a series of inter-connected short stories, rather than a sustained narrative.  As you can see from this synopsis, Of Human Bondage has material enough for several short stories, and perhaps even three-or-four novels.  For this critic, the most successful Maugham novel is The Moon and Sixpence (1919), a masterful evocation of Paul Gauguin and his world, because the story is sustained and each digression is central to the overall narrative structure.

Bondage is a largely autobiographical novel.  Like Philip, Maugham was orphaned, raised by a chilly Vicar, had a disability (he stammered rather than had a clubfoot), was fascinated by art and became a doctor.  This overlapping of fact and fiction became a Maugham trademark, later writing that “fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other."

The central interest in Bondage is the story of the Philip-Mildred relationship.  It seems as if there is no debasement, no humiliation, and no attack (physical or emotional) to which Philip will not submit in his love of her.  Mildred is a creation both comical and horrific: a prostitute with aspirations of gentility, a nitwit with pretence of learning, a living vampire in human form.  Though the abuses she heaps on Philip rivals the trials of Job, the fact that he loves her and willfully submits to her torments is always believable.  Perhaps Maugham, a homosexual at a historical period that encouraged self-loathing and recrimination, was exploring his own sexual anxieties in the Philip-Mildred relationship.  We may never know.

Maugham’s biography is the stuff of legend: world traveler, espionage agent, playwright, art collector, literary stylist.  Those interested in learning more should read Somerset Maugham (1980), by Ted Morgan, my favorite biography of this fascinating man.  Future installments will revisit Maugham and his work.

Maugham was something of an anomaly even in his own time, a ‘literary’ writer who was also popular with mainstream audiences.  This popularity has, perhaps, led to his dismissal by some literary critics who equate readability with irrelevance.  This is a mistake, as Maugham is one of the defining English language voices of the last century, who continues to be insightful, relevant and informative today.